


All the Memories I Hold Dear

by gremlins-came-and-got-me (Scared_Beings_in_the_Dark)



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Dead Claudia Stilinski, Dead Gerard Argent, Faeries - Freeform, Forgetting, Fostering Children, Joblessness, M/M, Stolen Child
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-20
Updated: 2020-06-03
Packaged: 2021-03-03 04:34:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 15
Words: 29,300
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24278926
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Scared_Beings_in_the_Dark/pseuds/gremlins-came-and-got-me
Summary: Deep in the woods, there lives a family, a mother, father, and six children. There used to be seven, but no one remembers the seventh child. No one, that is, except a boy living in town who listens wide-eyed and full of wonder to his mother’s stories of her exploration of the forests surrounding their small town.Years later, the boy, all grown up, stumbles across a faerie ring and a tiny faerie with mechanical wings. So starts the journey of magick, mystery, and love.
Relationships: Derek Hale/Stiles Stilinski
Comments: 58
Kudos: 161





	1. Cover




	2. Prologue

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title comes from Within Tempation's _Memories_.
> 
> If there are any tags that are missing, please let me know.

* * *

_Once upon a time, there was a king and queen who lived on the edge of a forest with their seven beautiful children. Also in this forest there lived a group of faeries, tiny sprites that envied the happiness of the king and queen and their children. So, these faeries plotted and schemed and managed to steal one of the children when he wandered too close to the trees._

“What happens next, Mama?” Stiles asked, bouncing on his bed. He loved Mama’s stories about the forest, about the faeries, and especially about the missing child, a boy Stiles’ age.

“It’s late, _kochany_ ,” Mama murmured, staring at the doorway where Daddy waited, frowning at them while he drank his coffee before going to work. “It’s Daddy’s turn to read you a story tonight.”

“No,” Stiles whined. “I want the faerie tale! Please, Mama?”

Daddy sighed. “He wants the fairy tale, Claudia.” Stiles knew Daddy couldn’t say it right. It always felt flat and mocking when he said it. “I guess you’d better give the boy what he wants or he won’t sleep at all, and he has that big spelling test tomorrow.”

Mama sighed, rubbing at Stiles’ head. “Fine. Stay and listen a bit, John, please?”

Daddy shook his head, drinking more coffee. “I have to go in early anyway,” he explained, only it sounded like lying. “One of the deputies needs off a little early today.” He stepped into the room and dropped a quick kiss to the top of Stiles’ head. “I love you, Stiles. Never forget that.” He kissed Mama too, except on her lips instead of her head. Stiles scrunched his nose at them, hoping, selfishly, that they wouldn’t kiss too long.

Daddy hugged him and waved and was gone, heading out to his police car, the mug rattling in the sink as he slammed the door behind him.

Mama sighed again before picking up her journal and flipping to a page where she’d drawn a picture of what the faeries might look like. Stiles didn’t like the way the one faerie had angry eyes and a thin mouth. His teacher at school got the same look on her face when Stiles wouldn’t listen and she wanted to call his parents in for talkings.

This faerie, Stiles decided, was a teacher, the meanest one ever. She wouldn’t like it if anyone did anything she didn’t like, and he could imagine her stealing away a little boy just because he wandered too close to the trees.

“Mama?” Stiles asked when she didn’t start reading.

Mama smiled down at him, kissing the top of his head like Daddy had done. “The faeries were magic, and they made the boy’s family forget all about him. Which was very sad, but no one was sad because they couldn’t remember to be sad either.”

“Mama,” Stiles asked in a small voice, “Mama, did the boy ever make it back to his family? Did they remember him?”

Mama closed her journal, laying it on her knee while she studied Stiles until he squirmed under her gaze. “Of course they did,” she finally said, voice thick with something oily, like lying. “They found him and they all lived happily ever after.”

“Even the faeries?” Stiles asked.

Mama ruffled his hair. “Most of the faeries,” she said. “Not the bad ones. They were punished by the good ones.”

“Mama,” Stiles said, letting Mama lie him down and tuck him in again. “Mama, what’s the boy’s name?”

Mama had never given a name before, so Stiles was surprised when, as Mama kissed his forehead, she whispered, “Derek,” so softly Stiles thought he hadn’t heard her at all.

“His name was Derek.” And then Mama shut off the light and closed Stiles’ bedroom door.

Stiles thought he’d never sleep, but he did, drifting off quickly, dreaming of faeries that didn’t like it when he couldn’t sit still, and dreaming of a boy his age, crying because his mama couldn’t remember him anymore.

~ * ~

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was part of my 2018 Nanowrimo. (The second "half" was [On the Grounds Where We Feel Safe (Vikings TV)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/17132915/chapters/40293221). I'm finding myself dragging my feet over these last few chapters and hope that any interest in this story will be the kick I need.
> 
> Thanks to everyone who reads this. It will be completed, but if you'd like it completed sooner, please talk to me about it either here or at [my Tumblr](https://1989dreamer.tumblr.com/). My ask box is always open.


	3. One

~Twenty Years Later~

“Stiles,” John yells. “Do you need this anymore?”

Stiles, downstairs getting more trash bags and tape, yells back, “What are you holding?”

His dad doesn’t answer. Stiles rolls his eyes, groaning to himself as he heads back upstairs to the attic. They’ve already managed to clean out Stiles’ old bedroom. It echoed now without anything in it except some old posters stuck to the walls. It felt like a metaphor that Stiles was resolutely ignoring.

He couldn’t find a job that he liked and was working part time as a barista in the new coffee shop downtown while he waited for his degree in biochemical engineering to become useful. In the mean time, his dad had said, and Stiles agreed, that there was finally time to go through and clean the house. Stiles knew his dad had passed all his tests. He was finally going to be a foster dad like he and Mom had dreamed about years ago when they realized that they’d only ever be blessed with one holy terror.

Stiles is ambivalent toward the newcomers. He’s happy for his dad of course, but also a little bitter. First, because Mom had died a long time ago and wouldn’t get to be a part of this chapter of their lives either. And second, because deep down, he was selfish and didn’t want to have to share his dad even if he knew these kids needed him.

Stiles sighs and climbs into the attic.

John is holding a lamp Stiles is positive his aunt Martha had gifted his parents some long ago anniversary—back when anniversaries were still celebrated—and had nothing to do with him.

“That’s not mine,” he says, holding out a trash bag. John tipa the lamp upside down and frowna at a message Stiles can see scrawled there.

“Apparently it is,” John says, passing it to Stiles.

Aunt Martha had written some sappy note that had smeared over the years. The only legible part was Stiles’ name, and not his nickname either.

“Why don’t I remember Aunt Martha ever visiting?” Stiles asks as he weighs the lamp in his hand before adding it to the new trash bag. He sets it down and turns to a wall of boxes while he waits for his dad to answer him.

The first box is Stiles’ drawings and scribbles from when he was in grade school. He’s engrossed in reading a story about a missing child, stolen from his family by a cruel teacher who suspiciously resembled his kindergarten teacher if the poorly drawn illustrations were anything to go by.

“She didn’t like the way your mom and I were raising you, so we told her where the door was.”

“What?” Stiles glances up from the page. His dad shrugs, digging into a box of winter clothes from the mid nineties, tossing coats toward the donate pile.

“Your aunt. Martha. Great aunt, really. She didn’t approve of your mother when I married her, and when we had you, Martha was angered that we weren’t ‘raising you right.’” John curls his fingers into air quotes, and Stiles stifles a laugh at the grumpy look pinching his face.

“Pretty sure the feeling was mutual,” he points out, and John nods.

“She was a bitch, even to the end. I’m just glad your mom outlived her by at least three years.”

Stiles laughs. “I’m sure Mom was happy about that as well.”

Soberly, he pulls out another box. This one has Mom’s handwriting on it. “John?”

John glances at him and freezes, staring at the box. “Your mom’s research,” he breathes. “I wondered where she hid it.” He kneels down and lovingly opens the flaps of the box, coughing as the dust of ten years billows up in his face.

The first journal he pulls out, Stiles recognizes. It’s the one Mom always read to him from. All those bedtime stories about the fairies and how they would steal a child from the kingdom by the forest.

Stiles had forgotten about those stories.

Mom had gotten sick, and her research became more important than her child. When she’d finally died, it had felt like a relief to Stiles, fifteen and newly smoking, drinking, and hanging out with the ‘cool’ crowd at school. Two months later, rock bottom, tripping up the stairs while his dad watched disappointingly from the kitchen.

The next morning, John had tipped his liquor cabinet down the sink and made a promise to Stiles to always be there for him.

It had worked. Stiles and John had remained sober for ten years. Seeing his mom’s old journals again makes Stiles’ skin scrawl and his throat itch for a whiskey.

Instead, he flips the book open, looking at his mom’s words and illustrations. There is the wicked fairy with the schoolteacher face and the little boy stolen from his family.

Something familiar pings in Stiles’ memory, but before he can grab onto it to examine it further, his dad claps a hand onto his shoulder.

“You’re welcome to keep it,” he says, voice loud in the silence. “Your mom would have wanted you to have it.”

“Thanks, John,” Stiles says, closing the notebook and tucking it back into the box. He lifts it up, surprised that it actually weighs quite a bit. “I’ll just go throw this in my car, okay? I’ll be right back.”

He knows his dad, recognizes the tightness around his eyes, the way his mouth is a thin line. He’s thinking about his wife, about losing her. He’ll need some time alone. So will Stiles. More time than taking a box of notebooks down two flights of stairs and sticking it in his trunk.

Stiles decides that he’ll call John from the car, claim that Scott got off work early and wants to go out for burritos or something.

“Stiles,” John says before Stiles can move, “I’m sorry, son. I don’t think I can do more today.”

“That’s okay. I’m kind of bushed myself. I’ll see how tomorrow goes and hopefully we’ll get back to this next weekend.”

“Good luck with the job search, Stiles.”

Stiles waves, and tries not to feel too bad as he drives away.

When he gets back to the apartment he shares with Scott, his best buddy since grade school, when Stiles lost his stupid obsession with the fairies his mom used to talk about, he dumps his mom’s journals on his bed and grabs a few crickets for Scott’s lizard, Spocky.

There’s still the empty terrarium where Miss Belle used to live before she died of old age. Scott’s been promising to get a new lizard for a few weeks now, but Stiles knows he’s not ready. Scott had Miss Belle for nearly a decade. She was old when he got her too.

He’s not ready. Stiles gets it.

Ten years later, he’s still not ready to let go of his mom.

He sighs, knowing already that he’s not going to get any sleep tonight as he goes through his mother’s journals.

He’ll be dead-ass tired making coffees tomorrow, but weirdly, he’s almost looking forward to it. Maybe he’ll finally understand what drove his mom. Maybe he’ll finally understand why she died.

Scott will be home in about three hours. For once, Stiles isn’t sure how he feels about that. On the one hand, he’d like to be alone with his mom’s journals and his memories, but on the other, he doesn’t trust himself. He knows where Scott keeps his tequila for emergency margaritas.

He decides to fuck it, and settles in on the couch with three of the notebooks. Mom liked the spiral bound, college ruled notebooks. There’s over thirty in the box. Each of them has a label on the front with a year. Stiles chooses the one she used to read him bedtime stories from to start.

It is definitely a story. Mom’s written “based on truth” on the first page. The second page starts with the classical “Once Upon a Time.”

Stiles can’t believe that there’s at least seventy pages of this story. Most fairy tales are wrapped inside of ten pages. He has an anthology somewhere that lends credence to his point.

After the first dozen pages, the story takes a darker turn. Where his mom had been vague before, the family unnamed, none of the faeries (apparently Stiles had forgotten that his mother had a weird way of spelling it) described, the next dozen pages are filled with strange symbols he doesn’t recognize.

Further in the book, his mom switches back to English, and Stiles gets to read all about the Hale family. Reclusive, notoriously private, the Hale family has been Beacon Hills’ biggest benefactors ever since they founded it.

Apparently the current family consisted of patriarch James, matriarch Talia, maternal uncle Peter, sons David and Daniel, daughters Aurora, Laura, Cora, and Isadora.

Hang on.

Stiles flips back to the front of the book.

Yep. There it is, in his mother’s handwriting: the Hales had _seven_ children. David, Aurora, Laura, Daniel, Cora, and Isadora. That’s six.

He closes his eyes and draws back to a long-ago memory of himself, five years old, listening to his mom tell him the story of the faeries for the millionth time.

“Once upon a time,” he recites, “there was a king and a queen who lived on the edge of a forest with their seven beautiful children.”

Six names. Seven children. Does Peter count as one of the children?

The door bangs open, and Stiles jumps.

It’s just Scott stumbling in, carrying too many bags because he doesn’t like to make more than one trip.

“Stiles!” Scott greets enthusiastically as he sets the bags down with far more care than Stiles was expecting. “What’s up? I thought you’d still be at your dad’s, cleaning out all your stuff.”

“Yeah, well, we ran into some of my mom’s things, and we didn’t feel up to it after that.”

Scott adopts a properly sympathetic face as he sorts his bags. Crickets get put on the gardening shelf he stores all his lizard supplies on. Take out for dinner is stowed in the kitchen while he throws laundry at the hamper Stiles keeps in the living room for just that purpose.

Scott washes his hands thoroughly before dishing out salads and burrito bowls from _Chipotle_. He sets Stiles’ plate on the coffee table and grabs the notebook from Stiles’ hands. He doesn’t read it before he sets it lovingly on the table too, picking up the plate and handing it to Stiles.

“Eat,” he advises. “You’ll feel a bit better with a full belly.”

“Will I really?” Stiles asks, but he obediently forks a bunch of sparsely dressed salad into his mouth and chews while Scott inhales his food.

“Want me to tell you about my day?” Scott asks.

Stiles nods gratefully, moving onto his burrito bowl. Scott knows what he likes, and he always gets it right.

“Okay, so we have this new client, right? And we’re pretty sure she’s a puppy breeder, only not like legitimate. We think she’s doing it on the side, charging an arm and a leg and using Deaton as a cover.”

“Do you have actual evidence or is this ‘we’ just you?”

Scott points his fork at him. “Deaton said it, not me. So hah. Anyway, she’s like totally scummy. Keeps bringing in these puppies that need shots and vaccinations and all that fun stuff. And she always pays cash. I mean, her bills are well over a hundred dollars a pop. Where the hell does she get so much money?”

“From breeding puppies?” Stiles ventures and is rewarded with another fork-point.

“And she came in today, only this time, she had a pregnant dog with her. So, Deaton’s going to investigate a little more, see how above board her operation is, and then I guess we’re going to shut down a puppy ring. Isn’t that cool?”

“Sure,” Stiles agrees. “So, what’s with the laundry?”

“Dog washing day,” Scott says. “I must’ve used about a dozen different scrubs today. ‘Cause every time I’d get one done, Deaton needed me for something else, so I’d change, then I’d wash another dog, and then help Deaton, and wash another dog. All day like that.”

“Cool,” Stiles says, even though it really isn’t. He’s done eating now, and he hates that Scott was right that he does feel a little better now.

He takes his and Scott’s empty plates to the kitchen and washes them quickly. Then he puts away the leftovers and grabs his mom’s journals on his way back to his room.

“Don’t stay up too late,” Scott tells him, already tugging his shirt off as he heads for the bathroom. “And let me know if you need anything from me tonight. Deaton gave me the late shift for tomorrow, so I won’t have to be to work ‘til 1:00.”

“Cool, thanks,” Stiles says. He doesn’t slam his door because that would be rude, but he doesn’t want more help tonight.

He’s not even sure he’s going to read more of his mom’s journals.

It’s a rabbit hole he doesn’t need.

Stiles falls asleep on the last page of the first book.

~ * ~

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If the past tense slips through and bothers too much, let me know. I started writing this story in past tense, switched to present, and switched twice more. Hopefully I caught all the tense changes, but I'm sure something slipped past me.


	4. Two

Scott knocks on Stiles’ door before he leaves for work, and Stiles swears a blue streak as he hurries, trying to find clean clothes and brush his teeth and hair. He forgoes a shower—rolls on extra deodorant and sticks the container in his back pocket—and breakfast. He makes it to work only an hour late.

His co-workers glare at him while he hurriedly ties on his apron and tucks his hair into the stupid hat they have to wear.

“This is my first time,” he mutters to a particularly vicious side eye from Wanda. She’d been late three times last week. “Besides, my dad and I were cleaning out my mom’s things yesterday.” He blows out a breath. “I guess I just got a little more emotional than I was expecting.”

His coworkers back off, giving him space, for which Stiles is grateful. The only one who still looks like Stiles pissed in her Cheerios is Wanda. But Stiles has heard, from Lulu and Davy, that she’s fucking the boss. Which is why she gets away with being late all the time.

Stiles will gladly take the write up—he was late after all—but he’s damned if he’s going to let Wanda glare at him all day like he threatened to spit in customers’ orders.

In fact, Stiles has caught Wanda doing just that. He’d reported her to the on-duty manager and she’d gotten a slap on the wrist. It’s probably why she doesn’t like him much.

Stiles doesn’t care.

He only cares that he earns enough on this paycheck to finally have enough extra cash that he can buy the kids his dad’s going to foster something special that is just theirs. As an only child, Stiles never had to deal with sharing except at school. He’s not terribly good at it.

He’s still a bit upset that he has to share his dad with three troubled teens instead of getting to keep him all to himself in his dad’s retirement. To make it up, Stiles is going to get each of the kids something personal. Something that costs like $50 apiece.

Stiles lets the waves of customers sweep over him until he can forget about Wanda’s open hostility and the way that none of his coworkers have spoken to him since he rolled in.

During clean up, he stifles a yawn behind his hand and tries not to wince when Violet tells him the boss wants to see him.

“You’re a good kid,” the boss starts, and Stiles knows what’s coming before he can even spit out the “But.”

Stiles doesn’t drag his feet home—mostly because he drove—but he also doesn’t rush.

Scott is feeding his remaining lizard when Stiles opens the door and trudges through the doorway.

“Bad day?” he says sympathetically.

“Fired day,” Stiles replies, throwing himself down on the couch.

“What happened?” Scott goes to the kitchen and comes back with a _taco carnita_. Stiles shoves it away when he offers it.

“I was late. What else is new?”

“It was your first time. Why was it a firing offense?”

“Because,” Stiles says into the cushions, gritting his teeth, “apparently I made Wanda feel bad when I told them it was because I was going through my dead mother’s things.”

“Oh that sucks.” After a beat, Scott asks, “Is Wanda the one—”

“Yeah, she’s fucking the boss. Guess she gets away with murder while the rest of us are expendable.”

“You’ll find something better,” Scott says, patting at Stiles’ shoulder. “You will.”

“And how am I supposed to do that, Scott? No one here is hiring, much less in my field. Face it; I’m useless, destined for a career as a retail worker.”

“You will find something,” Scott reiterates. “Now, I’m sorry, but I’ve got to get to sleep. We’re taking down the dog-breeder tomorrow. I’ll let you know how it goes.”

Stiles nods at him and then lets his head drop back to the couch. He doesn’t want to ever move again, so tired of the way that life keeps battering him when he’s already got his face smashed into the mud.

Tomorrow can only be better, he decides, if only because he’ll never have to deal with Wanda again.

He sighs and drags himself to his room. Instead of collapsing on his bed like he was planning, he digs out another of his mom’s notebooks, flipping it open and settling down to read more about the faeries and their way of life.

His mother was very meticulous, and it shows in the way she’s taken notes.

Stiles finds himself engrossed in her words, and unlike yesterday, he doesn’t fall asleep reading.

By the time he finishes this book, he knows quite a bit about the faeries, like that they’re tiny. No bigger than his thumb. And that they have wings. Butterfly wings, almost, if his mother’s illustrations and diagrams are anything to go by.

Stiles remembers his parents arguing when he was nine. It was shortly before his mother was diagnosed. His dad wanted Stiles to pick up a hobby, like butterfly collecting. Like Mom did, only Mom was mad that he’d even consider it, and had thrown out her collection.

Stiles wonders if that collection wasn’t butterflies but faeries instead.

He sets the book aside and grabs another. This one is different. Instead of having anything to do with the faeries, it’s completely about the Hales, but most specifically about one called…Stiles can’t actually read the name. It’s in that weird symbol language.

Stiles traces the glyphs, wondering how to even pronounce them.

He needs to find the code. The key. The cipher.

He doesn’t remember his mom being particularly into cryptography. His dad, on the other hand, loves codes. He’s got several puzzle books in different codes.

Stiles will take the books to his dad’s tomorrow, see if he’s up to looking at Mom’s handwriting.

For now, a wide yawn makes Stiles’ jaw crack and he knows he needs to rest. Tomorrow is a new day, a day that he can make into what he needs.

Scott’s right, he’ll find something better than a second-rate coffee shop.

He can always see if the Sheriff’s Station needs a record keeper while he puts in applications around town again.

He yawns again.

He sets aside the notebook and turns off his light, crawling under his blankets and resting his face in his pillow.

His brain buzzes harshly for a good hour before he finally drops off.

He dreams of a boy, a man really, his age, with mechanical wings and a missing name.

~ * ~

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Derek Hale/Stiles Stilinski relationship tag is for the final chapter/epilogue and does not happen for much of the story. I do not mean to be misleading with that tag.


	5. Three

John answers his phone on the third ring, a sleepy, “Stiles,” punctuated with a deep yawn.

“Hey, John,” Stiles says. “Have you talked to Scott recently?”

“Um, not within the last couple days. Why?”

“I’m coming over,” Stiles tells him instead. He doesn’t wait for a confirmation before he hangs up.

To his dad’s credit, he’s waiting on the porch with a cup of coffee and one for Stiles too.

“What’s up? Why’d you want to know if I’d talked to Scott lately?”

“Because,” Stiles pauses to take a deep breath, “I was fired.”

“Why?” John asks bluntly.

“Because I was late and my coworker is a bitch.”

“Oh, Stiles.”

“Yeah, so I guess I’m free to come over as much as you need me to, to get the house ready.”

“Yeah, there’s that. Hey, Stiles, you’ll find something, yeah?”

“That’s what Scott said.” He sighs. “I suppose you’re both right. But right now, I don’t want to think about it. I just want to help you get situated. I mean, the kids are coming soon, right?”

“Right. By the weekend. And school’s out for the year, so they’ll be around all the time. Plenty of time to get to know each other.”

“Two boys and a girl.”

“Erica, Boyd, and Isaac,” John says. “I’m looking forward to meeting them.” Stiles can almost hear his dad thinking too hard. “Do you think they’ll like me? I mean, they are teens. Two thirteen year olds and a fourteen year old.”

“I think they’re teens,” Stiles says. “In the foster care system. I think they’ll be wary, maybe angry. All you have to do is remember that it’s not your fault if they are. You’re great. You’re a great dad and you’ll be a great foster dad.”

John claps Stiles on the back and mumbles, “Thanks.”

He clears his throat and tries to smile. “You’ll find your feet soon, son. Don’t worry about that.”

Stiles scratches his head. “You know me, Dad. When do I ever not worry?” He grins, hoping to dispel the tightness he sees in his dad’s face. When it doesn’t work, he drops the smile and flaps his hand. “So, you were supposed to tell me if the kids had a wish list.”

“Oh, Stiles, no,” John says. “No, don’t worry about that. It’s all taken care of. Besides, we’ve got to make their birthdays and holidays really good too. And with you just losing your job, I don’t want you to worry about making the kids feel welcome with gifts. They’ll just be needing a lot of care and love.”

“I know, but I also know there isn’t a thirteen year old that doesn’t want an Xbox.”

“Look, why don’t we save the gaming systems for Christmas, or whatever they celebrate then, and you can, I don’t know, get the kids socks or themed bed sheets, or something personal but cheaper.”

“Okay, fine,” Stiles says, knowing that his dad is right. He shouldn’t spend money he doesn’t have. Besides, the kids would probably like a really good gift-giving holiday. Give them some time to warm up to living with John and having Stiles for a big brother.

“Stiles, I’ve got to get some more furniture. I’ve almost got the three bedrooms set up. Do you want to come with?”

Stiles opens his mouth to respond affirmatively and instead hears himself say, “If it’s okay, I’d like to get back to Mom’s journals.”

John nods like he wasn’t expecting anything else.

“By the way,” Stiles adds. “She wrote some things in a code. I was wondering if you had the key somewhere?”

“Code?” John shakes his head. “No, I don’t think so. I’m sorry, Stiles.”

“That’s okay. Mom only wrote like a million books. I’m sure it’s in there somewhere.”

“Let me know if you want help deciphering it,” John says.

Stiles waves. “I’m fine, but I’ll definitely keep you in mind.”

He doesn’t remember most of the drive back to his apartment, preoccupied as he is with his mom’s journals.

It’s obvious the first one he read was the one she wrote to be the bedtime story she used to tell him. But, what was the point of including all that stuff about the Hales?

Could it be that the Hales lived “on the edge of the forest” and had a missing child?

One way to find out. Well, two really, but Stiles isn’t ready to drive out to the preserve and question the Hales on their family tree. Besides, he’s positive with how thorough his mom was in her “research” of the faerie folk, she’s included a handy-dandy Hale family lineage tracker in the middle of her notebooks. She already had down the names of the current Hale family. Minus the missing kid.

Stiles holes up in his room and spends the afternoon and half the evening flipping through the books.

He finds more of the code—one whole book is written in it—and several more passages about the various faeries that populate the woods. Nothing more about the Hales aside from a passive remark here and there—“Saw the boy again. Told Talia.” “Will have to be more careful when trespassing on Hale property.” “Talia doesn’t remember. Why do I?”

Why indeed, Stiles agrees as he grabs the last book, a thicker notebook, an actual journal. He sets it on his bed while he clears away the rest of the stack, setting them reverently back in their box.

Then, he turns back to the last journal and goes to open it.

His hand slides off.

He tries again, and again his hand slips off the cover.

He tries scratching it with his fingernail and feels the way the leather physically repels him.

Something is wrong.

Stiles picks up the book and sets it on top of the others. Then he goes to find Scott.

“Hey.”

Scott jumps and jerks around on the couch where he’s watching some kind of scary movie marathon. “Oh, hey, Stiles,” he says when he catches his breath.

“Can you do something for me?”

Scott shrugs. “Sure. Now?”

“Please.”

Scott turns off the TV and follows Stiles back to his room.

“Can you pick up that book?” Stiles asks. Scott obliges, trying to hand it to him. Stiles shakes his head. “Can you try opening it?”

Scott does, fingers sliding off the same way that Stiles’ did earlier. “What’s up with this?” he asks.

“I don’t know. I mean, there’s no logical explanation, is there?”

“There might be one,” Scott says, pointing at the rest of the journals. “It could be that fairies are real and that your mom knew them.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Stiles scoffs. “How can faeries be real? They’re imaginary creatures, like unicorns or werewolves.”

“Yeah, maybe,” Scott says. “No, you’re right. Maybe this book is just glued shut? Want me to find some acetone or something?”

“No, that’s okay. Thanks though.” Stiles takes the book from Scott and sets it back in the box. “I think I’ll just leave that one alone.” He yawns, and Scott yawns a moment later.

“See you in the morning?” Scott asks, and Stiles nods. “Cool. Sleep tight, dude.”

“You too,” Stiles says, and then Scott’s back on the couch watching more television while Stiles stares down at the book he can’t open.

Maybe the code has something to do with it? He grabs the book written entirely in code and some paper. Then, he spends another hour trying to figure out the code. He thinks he’s got the ‘e’s and ‘d’s figured out before he gives up for the night, eyes gritty and burning, unable to stop yawning widely. He sets aside his tools and turns off the lights, collapsing face down onto his bed.

If he dreams, he doesn’t remember.

~ * ~


	6. Four

Stiles wakes up sticky and feeling like a truck ran him over. He drags himself to the bathroom where he scrubs wearily at his teeth and face before shaking enough tiredness to climb into the shower and let the hot water wash away a tension he was not aware he was holding.

He feels much more alive when he’s done, and he manages to catch Scott at the table in the kitchen, eating cereal while reading a magazine.

On the front is a model, dark hair, dark eyes. Stiles thinks he sees the edge of a tattoo curling around her bare shoulders.

“‘Allison Silver,’” he reads out loud. “‘Six tips to make your sex life fantastic.’”

Scott splutters into his cereal. “It’s not like that,” he protests to Stiles’ laugh.

“I think it is, Scotty, my boy.”

“It’s not.” Scott sets the magazine down and doesn’t pat Allison’s face even though Stiles thinks he really wants to. “Look,” Scott rolls his eyes, “she’s an up and coming model _and_ she’s a client of Deaton’s. I get to meet her every Thursday because she has this shelter she volunteers at and she pays for all the spaying and neutering of the animals, so she always has like three or four animals for Deaton, and then she needs distraction while she waits for them.”

“Aren’t operations overnight?” Stiles butts in, and Scott glares at him.

“Yeah. But, she doesn’t know that. I just talk to her while Deaton does the intake exam and then she leaves. She comes back on Friday, and I don’t get to talk to her because she’s not alone.”

“Are you in love?” Stiles asks. “Like, love-love or just stalkerish love?”

“Fuck you,” Scott says without heat. “You’d be in love too if you ever met Allison.” He sighs. “There’s just something so perfect about her.”

“If you say so, Scott. Hey, aren’t you going to be late for work?”

Scott checks the clock on the stove and curses, hurriedly drinking the milk from his cereal and dumping the mushy leftovers into the trash. He waves at Stiles and stuffs the magazine into his messenger bag, cramming his helmet on his head as he leaves.

Stiles sighs into the sudden silence. He should eat something, but he’s not that hungry. The prospect of being money-less for a long time curbing his appetite.

Instead, he returns to his room and drags the box of journals out to the living room. He spreads everything out across the floor, setting the journal he can’t open on the coffee table.

He opens the coded book, staring at the symbols with concentration, but they still make no sense to him.

He turns his attention to one of the other books, the one with the Hale family’s names spaced out. Under Talia and James Hale are seven names, but one of them is the same set of symbols. Stiles traces them. He thinks two of them are ‘e’s but without the key to the code, he can’t be certain. He could be wrong, but he doesn’t think it’s likely.

Maybe it is time to go out to the preserve, run into the Hales, and see if they know anything about their supposedly missing child.

Maybe. Maybe not.

Stiles sighs, dropping his head to his hands. He doesn’t want to make another family hurt the way he does whenever he thinks about his mom. It would be worse, he knows, if an absolute stranger came up to him and began quizzing him on his life with his mom. He can’t do that to the Hales.

The answer has to be in his mom’s books. But, Stiles thinks, sudden and sharp, why does he care?

If he’d cared before, wouldn’t he have helped his mom when she was compiling her evidence and her notes? Wouldn’t he have kept his interest and not lost the luster he used to have when she would tell him faerie tales?

Didn’t he love his mom enough to be her faithful assistant?

Stiles shakes himself. Of course he loved his mom. She was obsessed, and now he is too.

He sighs, closing the book.

He already knows before he grabs a jelly jar and punches holes in the lid, before he grabs his keys and the book with the illustrations of the faeries, before he climbs behind the wheel of his mom’s old Jeep that is now his, and before he passes the sign declaring the preserve to be private property, Stiles is going faerie hunting.

Just like Mom.

~ * ~

Stiles parks as far from the Hale house as he can and then heads into the woods.

He’s not sure what he’s looking for, but he knows he’ll know it when he sees it.

He hasn’t noticed maps in his mom’s journals, which makes him think that they’re locked inside the book he can’t open. It’s frustrating, made more so by the fact that he’s fallen for his mom’s obsession, that it feels as natural to tramp through the woods as it does to draw breath.

There’s nothing here. Stiles looks around, shakes his head, and stabs a twig into the soft loam to mark his path. Northeast, he decides. Not that mom’s journal gives him any hints.

Stiles pauses after an hour, cocking an ear.

He’d thought he heard something, but standing still, all he can hear is his heavy breathing and a few bird whistles.

Stiles looks down at the jar in his hand and suddenly feels a wave of disgust.

A few words, a few pictures, and he’s ready to throw his life away like his mom did.

Stiles rolls his eyes at himself.

He needs to reevaluate his life, put in a few more applications, and learn how to be the best big brother he can be for his new foster siblings.

As he turns to head back to his Jeep, he hears a tiny hum by his ear.

Mosquitoes.

Stiles slaps at the hum idly and is rewarded with a tiny squawk.

He snaps to attention and looks to his left, where the hum had been. Nothing.

Stiles checks the ground and gasps when he realizes that there is a tiny man with wings sticking out of his back lying crumpled near his foot.

As Stiles stoops to check on him, he notices, hidden in the shade of a large oak, a tiny ring of Amanita muscaria mushrooms. A faerie circle.

Stiles looks down at the man again. A faerie?

He flips open Mom’s journal and studies the pictures. The man doesn’t look like any of Mom’s illustrations, but that doesn’t mean anything. It’s been years since Mom was in this forest. He could be new or one she hadn’t ever encountered.

Stiles unscrews the top of his jar and uses it to gently scoop the man into the jar. He stirs as he slides down the glass, and the hum starts up again as his wings start flapping.

He shrilly shouts something at Stiles, but the glass muffles it, and Stiles shrugs helplessly at him.

“This isn’t just a dream,” Stiles reminds himself as he studies the man.

The man snorts, arms crossed over his chest. He has an eyebrow raised, and Stiles tries not to feel chastised.

“Of course it’s not a dream,” Stiles mutters, tucking the jar into his pocket despite the obvious protest of the tiny man. He heads toward the circle of mushrooms, carefully edging around them. He knows better than to touch them. That lesson, at least, stayed with him after his mom drummed it into him.

Other than the ring of mushrooms and the tiny man in the jar, nothing else stands out as being faerie-related.

Stiles huffs out a tired breath. He needs to go home.

But what to do with the man?

The right thing to do is probably to release him back into the forest, but Stiles thinks about the Hales, about any youngsters stumbling across this same faerie ring. He can’t let more tragedy befall them.

Stiles gathers more sticks and stabs them into the ground, creating a barrier around the mushrooms. Once done, he follows his trail back to his Jeep.

He doesn’t once take the jar out to look at the little man, too sure that if he does that, then he’ll be opening himself to an attack, a bewitching.

As he gets closer to where he parked, he realizes that there is a woman, about his height, long dark hair cascading down her back, which is facing him, staring at his Jeep.

Stiles comes to a sudden stop, and the woman turns.

“Ah,” she says, face blanking quickly. Stiles is puzzled by the fear he thinks he saw in her eyes. “I’m sorry. I thought you were someone else.”

Understanding floods him. “It was my mom’s,” he offers. “People stop me all the time to talk about her.”

He doesn’t say that he hates it, hates the constant reminder that all these people cared for his mom, talked to her, knew her, and not a one of them ever visited when she was sick.

This woman included. Stiles thinks he should recognize her.

“I’m Talia,” the woman says, hand extended.

Talia Hale. He recognizes her name from his mom’s journals. Stiles shakes her hand. “Stiles Stilinski.”

“Oh, you go by Stiles now,” she says, smiling sadly. He can see the memories play across her face.

“Did you and my mom…?”

“We were friends, long ago. You wouldn’t have been born yet. In fact, we were both pregnant.” A look of confusion crosses her face before it smooths away. “When you came along, you were so rambunctious. You were a real handful.”

“What about yours?” Stiles asks, rewarded with the same confusion. “Your baby?” he says again.

Talia frowns and shakes her head. “I don’t remember. It must have been Daniel, but he’s two years younger than you. It wouldn’t have been him. Maybe Laura?”

Stiles has a twinge of familiarity spike through him. He should know these names, this family. He should know the Hales.

His skin crawls, and he wants to get away, not sure if Talia is entirely sane. Maybe the same illness that took his mom has its hooks in her too because she just stands there, a blank look on her face as she runs through her children. David, thirty-one. Aurora, twenty-nine. Laura, twenty-seven. Daniel, twenty-three. Cora and Isadora, twenty-one.

“Pretty even there,” Stiles remarks before he’s aware of it. “Except for—”

“Except for Laura and Daniel,” Talia says with the same weariness as someone studying for a test and knowing they’re going to fail anyway. “I took a break between children?”

“Maybe you did,” Stiles says even as his mind casts back to the story his mom used to tell him.

The child between Laura and Daniel is the stolen child.

Talia shakes her head. “I’m sure it will come to me,” she says. “But Stiles, I’ve been meaning to ask you, how are you and your dad doing? I know it’s been a long time since I spoke to either of you.”

“How long exactly, do you remember?”

“Maybe ten years? For your dad at least. For you, probably closer to twenty. You used to always come with your mom on our lunch dates.” She smiles suddenly, the change beatific. Stiles can almost recognize her now.

He used to be with his mom everywhere until he started preschool, and yes, that included her excursions to a now-closed diner where she’d meet some of her friends for coffee and adult-gossip.

There was someone else too. Stiles is almost positive. A child, his age, dark hair, drawn features.

They would color together and pretend not to hear their moms talking about Mrs. Calvins down the road who ran a brothel out of her basement or Dennis Mascovec’s third wife leaving him because he couldn’t keep a job for more than a month.

But what was the child’s name? Was it a boy or a girl?

Laura or Daniel?

Or , the glyph-name?

The name sits on the tip of his tongue, and he so badly wants to blurt it out that it hurts to not be able to.

Talia eyes him with concern. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” Stiles says, and it only feels like a small lie to him.

Talia smiles again. “Stiles, I’d like to get to know you again, if you don’t mind.”

“Uh, sure?”

“Wonderful. I know the diner your mom and I used to go to closed quite a few years ago, but there’s a nice little burger place on the outskirts of Beacon Hills. Would you mind if we met there at least once a week?”

“Sure, yeah, no that’s perfect. Um, when did you want to start doing that?”

“Tomorrow, at 3:00,” Talia says. “Unless that doesn’t work for you?”

“No, it works. Yeah, totally. So, see you tomorrow?”

Talia nods. “Thank you, Stiles. Oh, can you ask your father if he’d like to join us sometimes too? I seem to have lost his number many years ago.”

“Sure, yeah. I’ll totally do that.”

“Okay, wonderful. Thank you, Stiles. I’ll see you tomorrow then.”

“Yeah,” Stiles says again, feeling like a broken record as he watches Talia step back. Stiles climbs into his Jeep and starts the engine.

Talia waves at him and then vanishes into the forest. At first, Stiles is afraid that she’s following his trail, but then he remembers that this is her home. It’s likely that she already knows about the faerie circle.

Suddenly, he recalls the jar in his pocket and pulls it out.

The tiny man has taken off his wings, and he lies curled on the floor of the jar, eyes closed. He’s too small for Stiles to see if he’s breathing, so he gently untwists the lid to let a better flow of oxygen into it.

The man rouses enough to curl tighter, and Stiles breathes a sigh of relief. He sets the jar in his cup holder. He feels like he’s being watched, so he scans his surroundings, but he doesn’t see anything.

Weirded out, Stiles puts the Jeep into drive and hightails it out of the preserve.

~ * ~


	7. Five

Scott isn’t home when Stiles gets back to the apartment, and for that he is very thankful.

The man is awake again, but somehow during Stiles putting the lid back on the jar and carrying it into the apartment, his wings broke, so he’s been yelling at Stiles for the last ten minutes.

When he finally pauses, Stiles shrugs at him, twisting his mouth into an apologetic smile. “I can’t understand you,” he tells him.

The man fists his hands on his hips and glares harder.

Then, he taps his own throat.

“You’re an idiot,” he says clearly, if somewhat still muted from the glass.

Stiles nearly drops the jar. “You can do that?”

The man shrugs. “I can do a lot of things,” he brags. “But that’s not important.”

“No?”

“No! What’s important is that you stole me from my home and broke my wings. I can’t fly without them! How am I supposed to get home now?”

“Do you really live in the preserve?” The man nods. “Okay. So, think of this as a vacation.”

“What’s a vacation?”

“It’s a holiday. Time to relax.” Stiles studies the man closely. The man scowls at him.

“I don’t relax,” he says. “There is no time to relax.”

“Oh, yeah? Then what were you doing when I found you?”

“I was assessing a threat to the colony.”

“Colony? So, you’re a bunch of bees?”

The man’s face scrunches up at that before he nods. “Essentially yes. Everyone has a task they’re assigned. Mine is security because I’m good with making things.” Almost shyly, he drops his gaze to his wings. “I built these,” he says. “I can fix them too.”

Oh no you don’t, Stiles thinks almost bitterly. He has a feeling that by catching this tiny man, this faerie, that he’s already exceeded all of his mom’s research.

He tips the jar harshly, catching the man in his palm and dumping him into Miss Belle’s empty terrarium. He snaps the lid on tight and then just stares down at the man as he squawks indignantly, shaking a fist at him.

Stiles sets the wings on top of the terrarium and then sets about collecting things he thinks the man will need to be comfortable while Stiles studies him.

A doll’s bed from one of Scott’s realistic furniture sets, a cotton wad from a pill bottle, and a packet of dry cereal.

He’s going to need somewhere to go to the bathroom, and Stiles ought to give him water as well.

A toothpaste cap should do well enough for a tumbler. A miniature bucket can suffice for a toilet.

“Hello!” the man shouts. “Are you even listening to me?”

“Yes,” Stiles lies.

“Give me my wings!”

“No,” Stiles says. “You’ll hurt yourself with them.”

“I’ve been using them since before you were born!” the man declares.

“Really?” Stiles counters. “When do you think that I was born?” The man remains silent and Stiles snorts, “That’s what I thought.”

Blessed silence reigns for a few minutes before Stiles kneels next to the terrarium. “Behave and I’ll get you water and a bucket,” Stiles tells the man. “And maybe you should tell me your name so I can have conversations with you.” The man doesn’t say anything. “Fine, have it your way…Miguel.”

“Derek,” the man mumbles.

“What?”

“My name. It’s Derek. Not Miguel.”

“Well, Derek. I’m Stiles. I’d say it’s nice to meet you, but you’ve probably deduced that that’s a lie. I’m just going to get you that water now. I might be a while. So, just, hang tight.”

Derek looks around the terrarium. “Hang tight to what?” he asks before Stiles leaves him.

Stiles searches the apartment and comes up with a hamster dispenser for water, which he washes out thoroughly before filling, a set of doll dishes that he puts in a small box Scott left empty on his desk, and a set of miniature buckets, one of which he fills with sand before setting in the corner of Miss Belle’s, now Derek’s, terrarium.

Derek doesn’t look pleased at the gifts.

“Do you ever smile?” Stiles asks, and Derek growls lowly without responding. “Fine. Have it your way.”

“My way is setting me free, giving me back my wings, and then letting me go home,” Derek shouts.

“I can’t do that right now,” Stiles says. “I need to study you. Make sure my mom’s research wasn’t in vain.”

Never mind that Stiles had thought she was crazy like the whole town did. Even John had given up on his wife’s obsession. Shows what they all knew.

“I’m not a science experiment,” Derek says, sulking. He marches to Miss Belle’s log and sinks down onto it, knees pulled up to his chin. “I just want to go home. Is that too much to ask?”

Stiles grabs the terrarium and carries it to his room. He doesn’t want to have to answer any of Scott’s questions when he returns from his job and finds Miss Belle’s terrarium miraculously occupied again.

Derek doesn’t do anything while Stiles spends at least a couple of hours searching through his mother’s journals. He doesn’t touch the one he couldn’t open last night, still positive that all the answers lay within its pages.

Frustrated at having a whole lot of nothing for his work, Stiles throws himself on his bed, burying his face in his pillow.

There’s something niggling at the back of his mind, but the harder he thinks about it, the more it slips away. This is not working.

Stiles sits up and studies Derek for a few minutes.

Derek is still sitting on the log, but he’s let his legs dangle, kicking his heels against the wood. Stiles can’t hear the thump of it, so he imagines whatever trick Derek used to project his voice doesn’t extend to the rest of his body.

“Derek,” Stiles says, and the tiny man’s head snaps up.

He scowls at Stiles. “What do you want?”

“Do you recognize this?” Stiles grabs the coded journal and flips it open to a random page, showing the symbols to Derek.

Derek studies them carefully and then shakes his head. “I do recognize it,” he says, “but I could never read it. The woman who used to write it didn’t want to teach me it in case one of the others discovered us.”

“The woman?” Stiles blinks hard. “The woman…my mother?”

“Claudia,” Derek says softly.

“My mother.” Stiles closes the book and sets it down. Then he sinks onto his bed and stares at the wall without seeing it. Derek knew his mother. His mother who in her later years before the illness took her would always be muttering about faeries and their victims. About the young boy taken from his family.

Stiles blinks again, slowly coming back to himself. “Derek,” he says, molasses in his mouth, syllables hard to expel. “Derek, are you a Hale?”

Even before Derek nods, Stiles knows, deep in his bones, in the pressure in his eyes, the way his nose burns with the coming tears, this is the boy he used to color with before something happened and his mom stopped meeting with Talia.

“Derek,” Stiles says again, and something clicks into place. He scrambles off his bed, wiping away the tears that he doesn’t even know why he’s crying. He grabs a pad of paper and a pen, writing “DEREK” in large letters. Underneath each letter he places the symbols he knows now is Derek’s name.

D E R E K

Derek is the key.

Or at least, a part of the key.

“Why do you keep saying my name?” Derek asks, irritated.

“Because,” Stiles replies, distractedly, already copying down a block of text, the first three sentences of the coded journal. He fills in the letters he knows, but there’s still too many he doesn’t know.

He sighs and drops the pen onto the paper, watching it roll off and fall to the floor. As he stoops to pick it up, he thinks of something else and grabs the journal he can’t open. He sets it on the bed and whispers “Derek” to it. It doesn’t open.

He frowns down at it, studying the cover. Unlike the other journals, which are just notebooks, this one is an actual journal with a leather cover and an engraved symbol on the front. Stiles runs his thumb over it, realizing as he does that it’s the same shape and size as Derek’s wings. He grabs them, slotting them into the groves.

There is a clicking sound, and then the journal opens itself, flipping through the pages before settling back at the beginning.

Stiles stares down at his mother’s handwriting.

_Once upon a time,_ it reads, _there was a king and a queen who lived on the edge of a forest with their seven beautiful children. Also in this forest there lived a group of faeries, tiny sprites that envied the happiness of the king and queen and their children. So, these faeries plotted and schemed and managed to steal one of the children when he wandered too close to the trees._

_That’s the story that I tell my son. The truth is far more sinister._

_There are faeries, that much is true, but they weren’t jealous of the humans’ happiness. They were mad that the humans had dared to settle on their land, and they wanted to punish them._

_Of the seven children, one was more curious than the others._

_Derek Hale._

_Five years old when he walked into the forest surrounding his parents’ property and never walked out. No matter how the Sheriff’s Department searched, nor how the town helped, the boy was never found, and three weeks after his disappearance, no one even seemed to care that he was gone._

_The whole town, and most especially, his family had forgotten that he ever had existed. The only one in the whole town who hadn’t forgotten Derek Hale was me. When even his mother couldn’t recall him, I saw his face, recalled the serious way he would color with my son. They were in the same grade, the same class, and when Mischief went to school inconsolable because he’d lost something that he couldn’t remember but knew was important, no one ever consoled him about his best friend._

Stiles pauses, lifting his gaze to Derek. He’s moved from the log and is now curled among the bedding.

“Derek?” Stiles calls softly.

Derek lifts his head.

Stiles taps the book. “Why did my mom remember you when everyone else forgot you?”

Derek shrugs. “I don’t know. Maybe something was missed when the spell was cast.”

“What spell?”

Derek fixes him with a flat glare. “What spell do you think? The one that made everyone forget about me. I became invisible too.”

Stiles thinks of the search parties, of his dad coming back day after day, discouraged because he could see signs of someone in the woods but was unable to actually locate them despite knowing he was right on top of them. Shortly after that, the whole search was called off, but Stiles can’t recall his dad ever being sad or frustrated like that again.

He remembers crying every day for a week and then suddenly stopping. He’d met Scott around that time, and they became inseparable. Mom had always seemed sad whenever Stiles asked to play at Scott’s, like she thought there was someone else supposed to be there.

Now knowing that his mom was the only one who remembered Derek, it makes sense.

“Am I going to forget you when I’m not looking at you?” Stiles asks.

Derek shrugs again. “I don’t know. Maybe. I wasn’t the one who did the spell. I don’t have that kind of magick in me.”

“What kind of magick do you have?”

“Small things, something a child can learn. Nothing major, not like the Grandmaster.”

“The Grandmaster is the head faerie, right?” Stiles taps the book again.

“Yes.” Derek stretches his hands above his head, yawning widely. “The Grandmaster is the one who stole me.”

“The evil faerie.”

Derek snorts. “I don’t know if she was evil so much as lonely. She couldn’t have children, so she decided to take me.”

“Why?”

“The same reason you blocked off the entrance to the dwelling: because I disturbed their home.”

“Those mushrooms.” Another question pops into Stiles’ head. “Did the Grandmaster cast the magick to forget you?”

“No. Not the same one that’s in charge right now anyway. It was her father that set up the protection spells.”

“I can’t imagine,” Stiles says softly, closing the book and setting it aside. He sinks down at his desk and stares into the terrarium. “I can’t imagine,” he repeats, “being forgotten like you’ve been. Tell me, once the faeries stole you, were you always this small or were you regular human sized?”

“Do you mean was I turned immediately or was there a time when I was in the woods surrounded by people looking for me and all of them passed me by?”

Stiles nods.

“The second one.” Derek crosses his arms over his chest. “The old Grandmaster wanted to teach me a lesson for trespassing despite the fact that I told him the land belonged to my family. It wasn’t until Kate saw me and decided she wanted a child that I was shrunk down and taken into the dwelling.”

Stiles recalls, in visceral detail, one of the times his dad had come back from the preserve after searching for the missing child and had sunk into his chair, leaned forward, and put his head in his hands. He’d cried because he could see the child but only out of the corner of his eye and only if he really concentrated on the single photo the child’s parents had managed to find.

“If I had the nose of a dog, I’d be able to find him,” he’d told Stiles later, when he’d finally stopped crying. “I keep trying to get the Sheriff to sign off on search dogs, but we don’t have the funds right now.”

“It’s a missing kid,” Stiles had pointed out. “What if it was me that was missing?”

The next day, his dad had found a dog to take into the woods, but by then, the trail was gone. Magickally covered, Stiles is beginning to realize.

“I’m sorry,” he tells Derek now. “For forgetting you, for keeping you here.”

Derek shrugs. “I’m used to not being able to go where I want. Kate keeps me on a leash. My wings won’t let me fly too high or too far no matter how I tamper with them.”

“Will Kate be able to find you here?” Stiles asks. He doesn’t relish the idea of facing a Grandmaster faerie, but he also doesn’t want to turn Derek loose in the preserve and have Kate, or someone worse, find him.

“She might, but the faeries don’t ever leave the preserve. I’m the only one who has. Well, at least I was before Allison.”

“Allison?” Stiles asks.

“Kate’s niece. She’s going to be the next Grandmaster when Kate retires. I’m hoping I can convince her to at least reverse some of the magick her grandfather did.”

“How did you meet my mom?”

“Claudia used to come to the preserve all the time. She found the entrance and would have stepped inside if I hadn’t stopped her.” Derek pauses to wipe at his eyes, and Stiles feels his throat burn with the tears he refuses to cry anymore. “She remembered me, she could see me. It felt like coming home talking to Claudia.” He smiles privately, and Stiles tamps down on a stab of jealousy. “She used to stick me in her pocket with a sprig of rosemary and a bit of cinnamon bark. Both things help deceive faeries.”

“I don’t remember reading that,” Stiles says.

“It’s probably in the journal you unlocked with my wings. I will want those back, by the way.”

Stiles doesn’t say anything. He still doesn’t want to give Derek any means of escape. He’s his last link to his mom.

But he also knows that he can’t keep Derek here forever. Either the Grandmaster faerie or someone human will discover him and the consequences will be severe.

Scott slams into the apartment then and Stiles swears, throwing his blanket over the terrarium, as if that’s going to make its disappearance from the living room any less obvious.

On cue, Scott calls his name worriedly.

“Yeah, buddy?” Stiles opens his door a sliver, hanging out in it, definitely not blocking Scott’s line of sight into his room.

“What happened to Miss Belle’s terrarium?”

“Uh,” Stiles says eloquently.

Scott narrows his eyes at him. “Move,” he barks.

He doesn’t give Stiles a chance before he shoulders him out of the way and steps into his room. He stops short at the sight of the blanket-covered terrarium. “Stiles,” he says slowly, “am I going to find Miss Belle’s terrarium underneath your bedding?”

Stiles tries to think of a lie, but his mind blanks. Eventually, he decides the truth might be best. “Yes.”

Scott turns around, eyes shining with something that looks suspiciously like tears. “Did you get me another lizard?”

“Uh, what?”

Scott rips the blanket off and then just stares at the contents. “Stiles, why is there a bed in here?”

“Because it’s for the faerie.”

Scott turns around, face thunderous. “What faerie?” he demands.

Stiles leans closer, trying to find Derek in all the sand and furniture. He finally finds him crouched under the log. “There.” He stabs a finger at the glass, and Scott follows his pointing.

“Where?”

Derek hunches down further. He looks miserable, almost as if he’s ill. Scott’s eyes skate over him again and again and Stiles realizes with a sinking feeling that the magick that’s hidden Derek for twenty years is working again.

“You know what, I thought I’d caught a faerie earlier. Turns out I didn’t. Bummer, right?”

“Right,” Scott agrees carefully. Stiles knows that tone of voice. That’s the tone people used, _he_ used, with his mom toward the end of her illness when she saw faeries everywhere.

Now Stiles is dying to ask Derek if he visited his mom when she was in the hospital, but he can see that Derek is getting worse and Scott just can’t see him.

“Okay, look. I just was trying an experiment,” he pretends to admit. “I really got caught up in my mom’s journals and she describes setting up, like, hotels for the faeries to lure them away from their dwellings. I wanted to feel what she did.”

“So you took my terrarium and my furniture to do it?” Scott sounds disappointed now.

“Well, yeah. I mean,” Stiles points out, “you’ve got everything she described using.”

“Okay. That’s true.” Scott sighs. “Look, can you please just get over your phase? You haven’t put out any applications since you lost your job and now you’re traveling down the same path your mom did.”

Stiles shakes with silent fury. “One,” he spits, “I just lost my job, like not even twenty-four hours ago. And two, of fucking course I’m traveling down the same path as my mom. She’s my flesh and blood. Her neurosis was passed along. My genes are just as bad as hers.”

Scott holds up his hands. “Okay, okay. I’m sorry.” He sighs, running a hand through his hair. “Look, can we just forget this conversation? Please? I’ll make supper, you’ll do your research, and I’ll tell you about my day. Okay?”

“Okay, fine,” Stiles says. He looks at Derek, who has crawled out from under the log. He looks a little better, but that might be because of the puddle of vomit in front of him. Stiles winces in sympathy as Derek drags himself to the water bottle and holds the depressor down, letting the water run over his head and down his body.

Fuck, Stiles thinks. He forgot clothes.

He doesn’t want Derek to be uncomfortable in wet clothes, and he isn’t sure it would be any better to let Derek roam around naked.

Stiles sighs, tuning back into Scott just as he says, “Allison gave me her number.”

“Wait,” Stiles says. “Model Allison? With the tattoos and the puppies?”

“Animals,” Scott corrects. “Well, cats and dogs anyway. Yeah, that Allison.” He smiles dreamily, all but floating off toward the kitchen.

Stiles looks between the terrarium where Derek is still washing himself and the kitchen where Scott has begun singing to the incoherent tune he batters out with his pots and pans.

“Hey, wait a minute,” Stiles calls. “Isn’t it my turn to cook?”

~ * ~


	8. Six

After supper, which Stiles did get to cook, thank you very much, Scott launches into a story of how Allison had brought a fawn of all things to the clinic.

“Aren’t there, like, laws or something against that?” Stiles asks around a mouthful of stroganoff.

Scott shakes his head. “Deaton is the only vet in town that’ll help with wild animals. It’s probably because he’s so close to the edge of the preserve.”

The fawn was adorable, injured, but freaking adorable. Stiles stares at Scott suspiciously. Scott likes animals; he wouldn’t work at the clinic if he didn’t, but Scott’s tastes tend to lean toward lizards and snakes. Hell, he had a tarantula when he was thirteen. Baby deer have never crossed Scott’s lips as adorable.

“You are in love,” he accuses, and Scott stumbles to a stop in his narrative.

“What of it?” he demands stiffly.

“Well, it’s just, isn’t she a model? Why does she keep coming back to Deaton’s clinic? No offense, but it’s not exactly on the way to anywhere unless you’re coming from the preserve.”

“Uh, duh? She brought a fawn in. From the preserve.” Scott sighs. “She says she lived there long ago.”

“I thought the Hales were the only people living there?”

“It’s a big place. They can’t be the only ones.”

“Did Allison or her family help with the search party?”

“What search party?”

Stiles waves his hand, thankfully the one without his fork. “When we were kids, remember? There was a search party for a kid that got lost in the woods.”

Scott frowns. “I don’t remember that. When was that exactly?”

“When we were five. Maybe four. Anyway. It was a Hale kid.”

“Really?” Scott’s eyebrows climb. “Which one?”

Stiles opens his mouth to say, “Derek,” and it closes without a syllable passing his lips.

“Who?” Scott repeats, and Stiles shrugs, stabbing at his food.

Why can’t he say Derek’s name? Does it have something to do with the forgetting magick?

Would the wings help?

“I’ll be right back.”

Stiles runs to his room. He stops short at the sight of Derek wrapped up in a blanket on the bed. “Shit. Clothes. Okay. Yeah. Clothes next. First this.”

Derek glares at him when he grabs the wings and runs out again. Stiles doesn’t have time to worry about it.

He can feel a building tension, like time is running out. If he can’t get Scott to remember Derek, then he knows he won’t have a chance with Talia. And fuck, isn’t that something? He’s meeting with Derek’s mother to reconnect with her and he won’t even be able to tell her the most important thing he’s ever discovered.

“Here.” He dumps the wings on Scott’s cleared plate.

“What are these?” Scott examines them, tracing a finger down the skeleton of the left wing. “It’s broken.” He moves one of the struts, and Stiles can see that it’s no longer connected. He fights down the guilt that he did that.

“This coracoid is damaged.”

“Animal speak, Scott.”

“Hmm? Sorry. The coracoid is the bone of the wing that is closest to the body.”

“So these are bird wings?”

Scott laughs. “These are very definitely mechanical. I don’t know a bird that needs metal bones especially as that would make it near impossible for it to take off or fly at all.”

Magick, Stiles thinks. It’s a hell of a thing. “Keep holding them,” he instructs. “I’ll be right back.” As he turns, he pauses. “By the way. I know you make doll furniture, but do you happen to have any doll’s clothes?”

“I might have something. Male or female doll?”

“Male.”

Scott snaps his fingers. “Got just the thing.” He keeps the wings in his hand as he goes to his room. Inside it’s a disaster. Stiles gapes at it. His room, while messy with some clothes thrown in a pile and a few papers scattered from various research binges, is neat by comparison.

“How do you find anything?”

Scott shrugs, making a beeline for a chest of drawers. He pulls out the middle top drawer and then tosses a pair of black jeans and a black t-shirt at Stiles. “Need undergarments? Shoes? A leather jacket?”

Stiles accepts a pair of underwear and takes it and the shirt and jacket, leaving the shoes with Scott. He doesn’t know Derek’s shoe size.

He puts the clothes in the terrarium, and Scott sighs in disappointment.

“I don’t know what I was expecting from that,” he says, and then his eyes widen comically.

“What’s wrong?” Stiles looks at Scott and then follows his line of sight to where Derek is pulling on the jeans, underwear already on.

“Who’s that?” Scott’s voice breaks and his finger shakes when he points.

“Um, that’s Derek,” Stiles says. “Talia and James Hales’ middle child.”

“They’ve only got six children.”

Stiles grabs his mom’s journal and thrusts it at Scott. He takes it, reading it quickly.

“The search party?” he asks when he’s done. “The search party was for Derek Hale?” Something seems to occur to him and, hesitantly, he adds, “Your dad?”

Stiles shakes his head. “He couldn’t find him. There’s magick at work here.”

Scott’s face scrunches, but he turns back to the book. “So, Derek has been magicked to, what, be forgotten?”

“Exactly. Give me the wings.”

Scott hands them over. Stiles clenches his fingers around them, trying not to break them further.

“Derek,” Stiles says.

“Who?” Scott asks. He looks to the terrarium. “Is that the faerie you thought you found?” His eyes skate over Derek again. From his position on the log, Derek looks mad and sick. Stiles presses the wings back into Scott’s hand.

“Derek,” he repeats.

This time, Scott’s gaze stops on the tiny man. “Derek,” he breathes. “Why can’t I remember him when I’m not touching these? Why can you?”

“I don’t know. Maybe it’s the fact that my mom could see and remember him long after the rest of us forgot him.”

“So up until—”

“Today.”

“—today, even you couldn’t see or remember him. And everyone but you needs to be holding this contraption to be able to even recall that he’s a two and a half inch man.”

Stiles nods. “Pretty much.”

Scott looks at Derek and then at the wings in his hand. “Only you, Stiles,” he says, handing the wings back and leaving the room. “I’ll get the dishes. Wanna watch a movie?”

“Sorry, I’m busy.” Stiles sighs heavily, throwing himself on his bed.

“Can I have my wings back now?” Derek asks.

“No.” Stiles sits up and slots them back into the locked journal. “I need to figure out how to reverse the magick enacted on you. And barring that, learn a few protection spells.”

“Whatever you learn, the Grandmaster will be able to break,” Derek says. “Unless, you give me my wings back, let me fix them, and I’ll help you.”

“And why would you do that?”

“Because, even though you are keeping me prisoner, you’ve also given me food, bedding, and clothing. You’re not mistreating me aside from disallowing me to have my wings.”

Stiles studies the wings. The broken piece is now dangling, and Stiles thinks he can see some wires inside the pipe. It’s not actually metal, he thinks. Just painted that way. “Why do they unlock my mom’s book?”

“I don’t know. She enchanted it that way. I only taught your mom the magick I knew.”

“Did you visit her when she was in the hospital?”

Derek doesn’t answer. Instead, he climbs onto the bed and pulls the blankets over his head. Stiles doesn’t press because he already lost his mom once. Derek lost his mother when she forgot him and then he lost Claudia too.

Aside from the faeries that took him, Stiles’ mom was the only person who remembered him. It must have been rough, and Stiles is glad that he didn’t have to deal with that. He knows his mom is gone and that she’s not coming back. Derek still has a chance to rekindle his relationship with his mother…if they can break the magick.

Stiles sighs and sits up. “Look, let me transfer the notes in this book to somewhere else so that I don’t need the wings anymore, and then I’ll give them back to you.”

Derek doesn’t respond.

Stiles doesn’t blame him.

He needs to figure out how to get the notes out of the book. It could be as simple as breaking the magick binding it, but Stiles is untrained and doesn’t want to accidentally incinerate something.

He tries writing the words down in another notebook, but none of the pens he grabs work. He tries tearing out the pages, but their binding is a lot stronger than he was expecting. He tries taking pictures with his phone, but even with a lamp held close and the flash turned off, the pictures are blurry, dark, and unreadable.

Stiles sighs, giving up for now.

He checks the time, finding it to be nearly 10:00.

“Where did the day go?” he asks, but he already knows it was spent in the woods and then on research.

Tomorrow is a new day. He turns off the light and crawls under his blanket.

~ * ~

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm not going to lie. Receiving no comments on most of my work is extremely discouraging for me. If you ever wonder why I don't write faster or post more, it's because I know my work is going to be read and then dropped like a hot potato, left to waste away in the dirt while I sit there and watch it rot.
> 
> I'm frustrated and upset that I can dump hours of work--days, months, years--into a story and receive 1% kudos to readership and less than .001% active feedback (comments, bookmark tags, etc.). I'm not going to give up writing, but if you like my stories, hell, even if you don't like them, _let me know_. Use your keyboard and tell me what it is about my writing that makes you look forward to what I post, what you wish I wouldn't write. Hell, tell me my characterization is off and this doesn't feel like what this person would do. Just tell me something. Otherwise, I'm just sitting here shouting into the void and eventually the void is going to swallow me whole without ever explaining why.


	9. Seven

Stiles wakes up to Derek yelling at him.

When he turns to the terrarium, he finds Derek glaring at him but otherwise unharmed.

“What?” he demands.

“Your buzzer keeps going off.”

“Buzzer?” Stiles searches his room before he settles on his cell phone. “This?” Derek nods. Stiles checks it. Seventeen missed calls, all from his dad. “Excuse me.”

He scrambles off his bed, ignoring the sour look Derek gives him. He can deal.

He dials his dad’s number.

His dad picks up before the first ring even finishes. Stiles stares at it in shock.

“Stiles?” John yells, and Stiles clamps the phone back to his ear.

“Yeah, I’m here.”

“Oh, good. I thought…I don’t know what I thought. I just…I need help. Now. The kids are being dropped off today instead of next week. I’m not ready. I thought I was, but I’m not. Oh god. Why did I think I could do this?”

“Dad,” Stiles says, and his dad trails off. It’s been years since Stiles called him that, preferring instead the formality of using his dad’s first name. “You’ve got this. All those tests, all those visits. What score did you get again?”

“I passed them with more than a margin of error,” John mutters.

“So the kids are coming early, so what? That just means you get more time with them.”

“That’s true, but I still need help getting some of the furniture together. Please, Stiles?”

“I have something I have to do later, but sure, I’m up for it.” Stiles grabs the jelly jar and three of the journals—the coded, the locked, and the storybook. Derek rages against him as he stuffs him into the jar and screws on the lid. He tucks the wings into his pocket. He’ll tell his dad about Derek…after he talks to Talia.

“I need you to be quiet,” he tells Derek when they pull up to his dad’s house. John is outside, watering his prize-winning roses with a kind of manic energy Stiles is used to seeing in the mirror. He’d thought he’d gotten his ADHD from his mom, but John had sat him down a few years ago and admitted he’d been Ritalin-ed to his eyeballs during his school years.

Stiles had found out when his Adderall had run out and his dad had split a pill with him to tide him to his next prescription.

They’d learned to manage it, separately, but it felt like a connection Stiles had never had with his father. He could point to his face, his eyes, his moles and see his mom in everything about him, but it was harder to pin down what his dad gave him.

“Let me out of here,” Derek growled, slamming his fists against the jar. “I take it back: you’re a horrible person. I hate you. If I ever get out of here, I’m letting the Grandmaster do what she wants to you.”

Stiles waves away the threat. Derek won’t be so quick to write him off when he gets to reconcile with his mother.

Stiles climbs out of the Jeep and points at the door. “I’ve just got something I have to put away if you want to finish up this?”

John nods, and Stiles hurries inside before Derek can project his voice to him. To be fair, since Stiles has the wings and not John, his dad likely wouldn’t remember hearing Derek speak once he stopped talking.

Derek glares at him when he sticks the jar in a cupboard. Stiles rolls his eyes and then remembers that he didn’t feed Derek this morning. He would make a terrible pet owner and vows to never tell Scott about it.

He grabs a toaster pastry, glaring at where he thinks his dad is now for having them before breaking off a piece of it, dropping it into the jar, and closing the lid tightly again.

Derek squawks angrily but when Stiles checks on him, he’s sitting cross-legged and eating the food. He notices Stiles staring and snaps, “Water.”

Stiles rolls his eyes again, already feeling the strain of it but he obligingly digs out a cap of some kind, runs water into it and sticks it into the jar next to Derek.

By the time he gets the jar back into the cupboard and hidden behind a box of Corn Flakes, his dad has come in, wiping at his face.

“So, the kids will be here in about four hours. I hope you have that much time on your hands because I’ve still got to get Erica’s bed assembled and a dresser put together for Boyd.”

Stiles checks his phone. “Yeah. Plenty of time.” It’s only 9:00 in the morning. He doesn’t have to be at the burger joint, oddly called _The Burger Joint_ , until 3:00. He’s got oodles of time.

~ * ~

The dresser is easily put together. The bed, not so much.

Stiles drops the headboard no less than three times. Once on his dad’s foot and once on his own.

They both curse and then get back to it.

By the time the bed is finally together, Stiles looks to the narrow doorway and fists his hands on his hips. “I hope the kids have no intention of switching rooms.”

John swats the back of his head. “Want lunch?” he asks.

“Sure.” Stiles follows his dad downstairs. Isaac gets his old room, Erica gets John’s old room, John’s moved to the office on the first floor, and Boyd will have the whole attic to himself. Stiles has to admit that his dad has really cleaned out the house. There’s a lot more room here than he ever got to experience. He’s almost jealous that there’s not room for him to come crash anymore.

They eat sandwiches standing at the counter while John talks about putting in a garden and maybe a basketball hoop. He’s heard that Boyd likes to play and that Isaac likes growing things. He thinks Erica’s an artist and has plans to turn the back shed into a studio.

“What about when I wanted to be a photographer?” Stiles asks around a mouthful of rye bread and thinly sliced tofu.

John shakes his head. “You never truly wanted to be a photographer.” He opens his sandwich, saltshaker in hand. Stiles grabs it before he can add any to his sandwich. John pouts, slamming it back together again. “I still have the first camera I ever bought you. I didn’t even have to buy any of the equipment before you were bored and onto the next thing that held your attention.”

Stiles grins. “And you were worried that you wouldn’t be a good foster dad.”

John has the humbleness to laugh at himself. “I guess I went overboard on the worrying thing,” he admits. “Thanks for being available. Hey, that reminds me, how goes the job search?”

“Not so well,” Stiles says. “I mean, I’ve got all the applications that I was submitting while I was at _The Coffee Shop_ , but I haven’t submitted anything new.” On a whim, he decides to lie. “I might have something lined up. That’s what I have to do at 3:00 today.”

“An interview?” John’s eyes light up. He looks proud, excited. It makes the pit of Stiles’ stomach drop.

“Yeah, something like that.” A bit of truth now to even the score, he thinks. “Also, I ran into Talia Hale. She’d like to reconnect with us. Apparently she and Mom were really good friends when I was little?”

“Oh yeah, she and your mom were in the same room when your mom gave birth to you.”

“Yeah?” Stiles tries to tamp down on the growing giddiness in his chest. “Which of her children was Talia giving birth to then?”

His dad pauses, thinking. “You know,” he finally says slowly, tapping his chin, “I don’t recall. Must’ve been Laura or Daniel—those are the two closest in age to you.”

“Yeah,” Stiles agrees, “except, Laura is older than me by two years and Daniel is two years younger. She wouldn’t have been in the maternity ward unless she was giving birth.”

“Or she worked there,” John points out. He shakes his head though. “No. I remember being in the room just before Talia was wheeled out for a c-section. Complications.” John’s tongue comes out. “I can almost see her baby,” he tells Stiles. “She named him something with a ‘D.’ All the boys had D-names. The girls’ names all rhymed.”

He shakes his head again. “Oh well, it’ll come to me.”

From the cupboard, the jar rattles, and Stiles flails, fumbling the remains of his not-very tasty sandwich onto the floor. “Oh, jeez, I’m sorry.” He throws it away.

“I’m sorry too.” John stares forlornly down at his sandwich. “I have a roast planned for tonight.” To Stiles’ stiff glare, he shrugs. “Teens need lots of nutrient-rich food. Besides, do you honestly think I’m going to get any? Three,” he sticks up fingers, “teens. All at that age where they’ll shoot up overnight if properly fed and rested.”

Stiles laughs. “Yeah, okay,” he acquiesces. “Fine. As long as you keep yourself in moderation with or without their help.”

John salutes him and then heads outside to find his tiller.

Stiles opens the cupboard and pulls out the jar.

Derek would be glaring, he thinks, except he’s been ill all down his front, and he still looks like he might throw up again.

“Okay, you’re okay,” he babbles as he opens the jar and gently tips Derek out into his hand. He sets him on the side of the sink and rinses out the jar. He takes a paper towel and scrubs as best he can at the stains on the front of Derek’s shirt. “We’re definitely going to have to raid Scott’s doll clothes again.”

Derek grunts. “If you’d stop talking about me to people, I’d be fine.”

“Yeah, sorry about that.”

“Who are you talking to?” John asks.

Stiles whips around, hand coming up to block Derek from view. “Just myself,” he says after a too-long beat.

John looks at him suspiciously. “Your mom used to say the same thing whenever she didn’t want to tell me she’d been talking to ‘faeries’ again.” He squints at Stiles. “Is that what you’re doing now?”

“No?”

John points at him. Then, apropos of nothing, he says, “Derek.”

Derek vomits.

“Who?” Stiles asks, surreptitiously scooping Derek into his hand.

“Who?” John repeats. “What did I say?”

Stiles curls his fingers around Derek—gently, so as not to hurt him further. “Nothing,” he says. “Nothing at all.”

“Okay.” John turns away. “If you need anything,” he calls over his shoulder, “let me know.”

“Thanks, John.”

Stiles heads out to his Jeep and sets Derek in the cup holder. “Okay. New clothes. Something to help settle your stomach. Uh, what else?”

“My wings.”

“No way, dude. I need them to make your mom remember you.”

“My mom?”

“Talia, dude. Talia Hale.”

“My mom.” Derek sinks down, chin on his knees, arms wrapped around his legs. “My mom won’t remember me.”

“Not without the wings.”

“I can have them back after?”

“If I can figure out how to access the information in the book that is unlocked with them, yes. If not, no.”

“They’re mine. I built them. It’s not my fault that your mom used my wings as a key.”

“Why did she do that?”

Derek shrugs. “Maybe she needed them to counteract the magick used by the Grandmaster.”

It makes sense, in a way. “So, the Grandmaster can make us all forget you except when we hold onto your wings.”

“Except you and your mom. You’ve both remembered me on your own.”

“And why is that?” Stiles muses to himself. He doesn’t expect an answer from Derek and isn’t disappointed when he stays silent.

Stiles doesn’t have an answer yet. He thinks it’s in the locked journal, but he needs uninterrupted time with it, and he is beginning to feel guilty about keeping Derek’s wings from him.

He stops at the apartment to let Derek wash up and change. By the time they are back in the Jeep, they have thirty minutes to get to _The_ _Burger Joint_ to meet Talia.

Stiles hopes it goes well, for Derek’s sake.

~ * ~

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to everyone who did leave a comment on last chapter. My intentions were not to guilt trip anyone into commenting. I know I have anxiety when I put myself in that kind of position, so I understand why many people don't leave comments. That said, it's still rather discouraging to put in a lot of work and have almost no feedback for it.
> 
> I do appreciate all the kudos, subscriptions, and bookmarks too.
> 
> Thank you to everyone who is reading, and a special thanks to those that leave comments for me.


	10. Eight

Talia is already in a booth, an untouched order of fries in front of her. Stiles’ stomach rumbles in anticipation. He refuses to even touch his menu, and when a waiter stops by the table, he asks for a glass of water.

She eyes him oddly, and Stiles flashes his most charming smile.

Talia stops her and orders a double-bacon cheeseburger and a fresh order of fries.

“Why?” Stiles asks when they’re alone.

Talia shrugs. “It’s what I’d do for any of my kids. Besides, you can’t tell me you’re not hungry.”

She smiles indulgently, pushing her basket across the table.

Stiles accepts the gesture for what it is, cramming a handful of cold fries into his mouth. Talia watches him fondly as he chews and swallows.

“What do you want to know?” he asks when his mouth is free again.

“Anything you want to tell me.”

Stiles sets aside the fries and takes out Derek’s wings. He hands them to Talia, letting her study them while he helps Derek onto the table.

“What are these?” Talia glances from the wings to Stiles’ face. She huffs a half-laugh before spying Derek standing by Stiles’ elbow. “What is that? A doll?”

Stiles sighs. “You know my mom was,” he casts about for the right word, “consumed with proving the existence of faeries.”

Talia’s face closes off. “Yes. I did know that.”

“Well. She left me a bunch of journals that seem to prove their existence all right.” He reaches for the wings, tapping them. “And this is the physical evidence that she found.” He nudges Derek forward. “Talia, this is Derek.”

A full body shiver overtakes Talia, and she blinks, fingers clenched around the wings. “Derek?” she repeats softly, studying Derek. “Derek, my son?”

“Yes.”

Derek touches his throat. “Mom?” He sounds a hairsbreadth away from crying. “Mom, you remember me?”

Talia nods, wiping away her own tears. “You’re so small, but you’re all grown up. What happened?” She presses a hand to her mouth. “Why didn’t I remember you before now?” She stares down at the wings in her palm. “How is this possible?”

As an experiment, she sets the wings down, letting go of them. Her eyes skip over Derek. She focuses on Stiles again, smiling at him.

Derek lets out a tiny sob.

“Please pick up the wings again,” Stiles urges her. He needs to find a way to make remembering Derek a permanent thing. He can’t do that without Derek’s cooperation. Stiles knows Derek knows more magick than he’s letting on.

If he wants his mom to remember him without the wings, then he’ll have to work with Stiles.

Talia cautiously lifts the wings again. Her gaze snaps back onto Derek. “What is this?”

“Magick,” Stiles says. “The kind my mom kept trying to get the rest of us to understand.”

“Claudia was right?” Talia reaches out a trembling finger to touch Derek’s hair. He leans into the touch, tears streaming down his face. “My son. I can have my son again?”

“Yes, but we need a way to break the curses that the Grandmaster put down. There’s at least two curses: the one that makes everyone forget him and the one that makes him small.”

“And how do we break them?”

“I don’t know yet.”

Stiles has the sudden realization that he can’t make Derek come with him again as long as Talia is holding the wings. If she remembers Derek, both of them will want to stick together. Stiles needs the wings to read his mom’s journal.

It feels low to do this, but he leans forward and, before anyone can anticipate it, plucks the wings from Talia’s palm.

Before he even gets them into his pocket, she’s already forgotten Derek again. Derek sinks onto the table, face in his hands. His shoulders shake with the force of his sobs. Selfishly, Stiles is glad that his vocal projection isn’t active anymore.

“So, Stiles, tell me a little bit about yourself.”

Stiles scoops Derek back into the jar and tucks it by his side. He’ll need to apologize to him later. For now, Stiles focuses on Talia. “Well, I lost my job recently so I have that going for me.” He pauses to eat more cold fries. “My dad is going to be a foster parent, so I’ll finally have siblings.”

“Ah yes, the wonderful joy a full house brings.” Talia draws a line on the table. She taps once for every kid, and Stiles notices when she hesitates between Laura and Daniel. Maybe the wings left residue on her hand?

The waiter drops the plate with the burger and fries in front of Talia.

“Anything else I can get for you?”

“No, this is fine. Thank you.”

Talia waits until the waiter walks away before she slides the plate to Stiles. He digs in gratefully, stomach rumbling. He pauses mid bite. When was the last time Derek ate something? Probably that toaster pastry and he puked that up.

Guiltily, Stiles breaks off a bit of the bacon and takes an end off a fry and drops them into the jar. Derek barely glances up when the food falls on him. He’s still crying, hiding his face. Stiles doesn’t blame him. But he steels his heart.

There’s too much at stake right now, even if that means that Stiles is the bad guy.

Well, today, he is a well-fed bad guy. He finishes the burger and fries quickly, thanking Talia when she picks up the check.

He vows to repay her by breaking the Grandmaster’s curses and returning her son to her permanently.

For someone with no job and very little money, it will have to do.

Stiles carefully conceals the jar when Talia hugs him goodbye, asking to see him again next week.

“Sure,” Stiles lies through his teeth. If he can restore Derek to his human size, then Stiles has no desire to be anywhere near the Hales. Not the least of which is because they will need their privacy.

Today, he is selfish.

He needs to know what his mother wrote.

He feels lower than a heel setting Derek’s jar back into the cup holder, but not low enough that he reconsiders his course of action.

~ * ~

Derek doesn’t move when Stiles sets him back into the terrarium. He hasn’t eaten either the bacon or the fry and doesn’t look like he’s going to anytime soon.

Stiles sighs, taking the wings out of his pocket. He unlocks his mother’s journal and starts reading again.

_I never knew what to say to Mischief whenever he cried over his lost friend, but I can’t deny the relief and guilt I felt when he moved on. Everyone moved on._

_My husband couldn’t find the boy despite following him for three days. When John forgot, I was so glad that he wouldn’t have to carry the fact that he’d failed to find Derek again. I used to go out to the preserve to see if I, the only one who remembered Derek, could find him, but by then the faeries had magicked his trail. Not even the best dogs could pick up the boy’s scent._

_But, this is not my story. This is the story of how to save Derek Hale. And Mischief, if you’re reading this, then the first part was successful. Tell Derek I’ve never stopped looking for the answer. Mischief, I love you. You’re a strong person. All you need is belief. And my code._

The following letters are all in his mom’s code, but they look different.

Stiles realizes then, that there are forty-one symbols. He finds the ‘e’ in the fifth place. Realization zings down his spine and he grabs another piece of paper and copies the code. For some reason, these symbols stick to the page.

Then, he writes the alphabet beneath the corresponding symbols. The last fifteen symbols are unknown, but he thinks with the majority of the code decoded, he’ll be fine.

_I know it probably isn’t Mischief who found this book, but I hope it is. Regardless, to read the rest of this book, you must get Derek to say a certain word. He won’t know it, and I can’t tell you: I’ve enchanted it too much. I can tell you this, it is a very special word, not easily said. I’ve written down how to break the other enchantments, the ones that hold Derek bound to the faeries. All you need to do to access the information is break this first enchantment. Good luck, Mischief, I believe in you._

All the rest of the pages are blank, and Stiles stares at them in disbelief. They weren’t blank last night, were they? They must have been, but he swears he saw his mom’s handwriting when he first unlocked the book.

And now he needs a word, like another key. What word could his mother have possibly enchanted so that Derek could un-blank the pages?

She had to have left him some clues, but Stiles’ mind is spinning too much for him to focus. He needs more food.

Also, the foster kids should have arrived and gotten settled by now. He needs to go buy socks or something and then meet them for supper.

He closes the journal, and it locks. Then he tucks the wings into his pocket before opening the terrarium.

Derek doesn’t move when he lifts him out.

“Hey, I’m sorry I couldn’t let you stay with your mom,” he says softly. Derek doesn’t answer. “But my mom left instructions on how to break the enchantments on you. If you’ll work with me, trust me for a little longer, I promise to have you back with your family as soon as I possibly can.”

Derek perks up a little. “Claudia left instructions?” he asks, hand to his throat.

“Yes,” Stiles says. “She enchanted a word that I have to get you to say.”

Derek’s brow furrowed. “A word?” he repeats. “Like what? Like asparagus? Or cauliflower?”

“Or cinnamon,” Stiles suggests. “I don’t know what the word is, and you don’t either. I guess it was my mom’s way of making sure the faeries couldn’t, I don’t know, stop the breaking of the enchantment? So that their original enchantments could be broken.”

Derek looks at him, blinking slowly in a way that usually means a headache. “So you have to get me to say the word?” he finally asks. “Or can I just keep guessing random words?”

“Well, I think my mom left clues as to what the word actually is, but yeah, sure. Go ahead and try as many words as you can think of. For now, we need to go to my dad’s for supper.”

“The new kids,” Derek says. “The teenagers.”

“Yeah. Anyway, I need to stop off somewhere and buy something. Will you be okay in the car or should I bring you in with me?”

“With you,” Derek says. Stiles agrees. It’s late summer and still hotter than balls when the sun is shining. He doesn’t relish the idea of leaving Derek unattended in his Jeep anyway.

He slides on an open button-down shirt and tucks Derek into the left breast pocket before he heads out to a local department store.

Despite his father’s warning and his own common sense, Stiles picks out a basketball for Boyd, a sketchpad for Erica, and a variety of flower and vegetables seed packets for Isaac.

He doesn’t wince at the total but it’s a near thing.

He pulls up to his dad’s house and knocks. It feels so weird to do that, but Stiles appreciates the fact that this isn’t his home anymore…at least until he can no longer pay his half of rent and Scott kicks him out in favor of a roommate with a job.

If that ever happens, he’ll sleep in the garage.

John answers the door. “Oh,” he says, visibly relieved. “I thought you were the social worker back again.” He waves Stiles inside. “Come and meet the kids. They’re just getting washed up for supper now.”

Stiles shoves the bag of presents at his dad. “I know you said to get them socks or something, but I think these will be better received.”

“Thanks, Stiles. Why don’t you go wash up and join us? I made lots of food. Teenagers.”

“Make sure you tell them it’s okay to eat as much as they want,” Stiles says. He doesn’t get two steps into the house before he notices three pairs of eyes on him. The three kids are huddled on the stairs, staring at him with pretend disinterest. Two boys, one girl. Two blondes, one shaved head. Two white, one black. Three wary teens.

John pushes past him and heads to the kitchen.

“Hi,” Stiles says, neither loud nor quiet. “I’m Stiles. John’s son.”

“If you’re his son,” the blonde boy says, “why’d he get more kids?”

“Because he’s lonely,” Stiles answers, “and I’m an only child. He always wanted more kids.”

“Why couldn’t he make more?” the blonde girl demands.

“Because my mom died.”

“What’s in your pocket?” the tallest kid asks.

“My pocket?” Stiles glances down. Derek has popped his head above the edge of the pocket and is studying the teens. “Um, you can see him?”

“Why do you have a doll in your pocket?”

Stiles doesn’t think he’ll like the blonde boy. He’s too abrasive and angry. But, John would smack the back of his head if he knew that Stiles was already thinking negatively about his new foster siblings.

“He’s not a doll,” he says instead.

Derek presses his hand to his throat. “There’s something about them,” he tells Stiles. “I don’t feel sick when you talk about me to them.”

“Oh holy shit, it talks,” the girl breathes.

“I’m Stiles,” Stiles tries again, “and this is Derek.”

“Boyd,” the not-blonde boy says, pointing at himself. “Erica.” Blonde girl. “And Isaac.” Blonde boy. “Why is Derek so small?”

“He was cursed by a faerie.”

“Now you’re just making shit up.” Isaac frowns at him, but he shuffles forward with Boyd and Erica as Stiles sets Derek in his palm.

“Faeries don’t exist,” Isaac adds.

“Give me my wings and I’ll show them just what faeries can do.”

Stiles shakes his head. “Sorry, nope. Anyway, we should go see what my dad made for supper, okay?”

Derek huffs. “Are you ever going to give me my wings?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Then why not now?”

Why indeed? Was decoding his mom’s journals really worth more than allowing Derek to return to his family? Well, actually, Derek’s family still won’t remember him unless they’re holding the wings, and the wings are too small to share. No. The only way to return Derek to his family is to break the curses. And to do that, Stiles needs the wings to unlock his mom’s journal after Derek says the magic word.

Stiles girds his resolve. “Listen, once the rest of the pages are visible again and the enchantments are broken, then I will give you your wings back. Deal?”

Derek glares at him. “Only because you’re still holding me hostage,” he says, and then turns off his voice. Whatever. Stiles will sneak him some food and then think of words that his mother might have used as her _abracadabra_.

~ * ~


	11. Nine

After supper, during which the topic of Derek and faeries somehow never comes up, Stiles gives out his gifts. Boyd loves the basketball, and John promises to set up a basketball hoop within the next few days so that he can play. Erica squeals loudly when she sees the sketch book.

“I was almost out of pages in my current book,” she says, throwing her arms around Stiles and squeezing him hard. “Thank you, thank you, thank you!”

Isaac fingers the seed packets, and while he doesn’t show any emotion one way or another, Stiles swears he sees tears brimming in his eyes.

John makes hot cocoa for everyone, despite the fact that it’s still eighty-five degrees outside, and while he’s busy, Stiles lets Derek onto the table with a kernel of corn and a sliver of beef.

Stiles is relieved to note that Derek seems willing to accept the food without complaint or glaring.

While Derek eats, Stiles grabs his dad’s shopping list and begins writing down words.

“What does watermelon have to do with faeries?” Erica asks, reading over his shoulder.

“I need a magic word to unlock the rest of my mom’s journal,” he explains. “But I don’t know the word, and neither does Derek.”

“So it’s watermelon?”

“Watermelon,” Derek repeats. “Nope. That’s not it.”

“How do you know? The journal isn’t here.”

“When an enchantment is reversed, there is usually a glow of some kind. Depending on how strong the caster’s magick is. Claudia’s magick wasn’t the strongest, so I think it’d be small. Green or purple. There wasn’t anything, so therefore, not watermelon.”

“Even without the journal here?”

Derek shrugs. “As long as part of the enchantment is present, then the undoing of the magick is obvious.”

“So, what, you’re just supposed to glow when the magick word is spoken? Is that it, Derek?” Stiles can’t help the sarcasm that laces his words. He’s suspended a lot of disbelief for this, and while the irrefutable proof is standing on the table, clenched hands fisted on his hips, Stiles wonders if Derek isn’t full of shit and trying to pull one over on him.

“Yes, that’s exactly it,” Derek snaps back, “ _Mieczysław_.”

Stiles feels a little like an idiot when Derek is suddenly surrounded by a soft purple glow, wind that cannot be felt lifting his hair and clothes like he’s in a tornado before the glow fades.

“What,” Stiles says.

“That was cool!” Erica cries. “Can you do it again?”

“The.”

“I think that was the magick word,” Boyd interjects. Isaac murmurs his agreement.

“Fuck?”

Derek smiles self-satisfied. “Told you it would be obvious.”

“Does that mean that the journal is readable now?” Stiles hurriedly scoops Derek back into his palm and tucks him into his pocket.

John chooses that moment to return, carrying a baking sheet loaded down with steaming mugs.

“Hey, Dad, something came up and I’ve got to head back now,” Stiles lies smoothly. Or not at all from the way John’s brow furrows.

“Okay,” he says. “Call me if anything’s wrong, okay, Stiles?”

“Will do. See you later.”

He all but runs from the room, and as the door swings shut behind him, he hears Isaac ask, “Are we just going to pretend that didn’t happen?”

_Unfortunately, kiddo,_ Stiles thinks, not without some bitterness, _you’ll find that pretending something didn’t happen is a staple of adulthood._

Derek barfs in his pocket.

“Sorry,” Stiles mutters distractedly. He can’t worry about it right now. He just needs to get home. Needs to see if the journal’s text has reappeared. Needs to see if he can break the enchantments already.

Belief and his mom’s code. That’s all he needs, so he holds his breath and believes real hard.

When he gets to his room, he finds the journal still locked, and he fumbles the wings into the emblem. When he flips to the page about belief, he notices that the rest of the pages are still blank.

“Hey,” he says, digging Derek out of his pocket and trying not to be grossed out by the masticated food sticking to him, “say my name again. Please?” he adds, almost as an afterthought.

“Mieczysław,” Derek says tiredly. He glows purple again and the pages of the book flutter as the strange wind sweeps through them. Text appears as they turn. Stiles sets Derek in the terrarium near the hamster bottle and grabs his notebook and a pen. Copying down the code is tiresome, but Stiles pushes through it. Who knows if he has to have Derek say his name every time the journal is unlocked?

He half expects the text to disappear as soon as he lays his pen down, but the symbols stay on the page. Weird. It must be a part of the enchantment of his name.

“Derek, we did it!”

Derek doesn’t answer, and Stiles peers into the terrarium to check on him. He’s on the bed, stripped down to his boxers, torso wet and heaving.

“Hey, Derek?” No response. “Derek, are you okay?”

Stiles gently lifts him up and runs a finger down his sternum. Derek’s body shivers violently and then curls on itself. Sick with worry, Stiles heads out to the living room to see if Scott is home. He is.

“What’s up?”

“Fix him, please,” Stiles begs, thrusting Derek’s unresponsive body and the wings at Scott.

“I’m a vet,” Scott protests, but he takes Derek and the wings, studying him. “I don’t know if we can even take him to the hospital. What happened? And why do you have a tiny man in your room?”

“Not important, and I don’t know. We were at my dad’s for supper. Derek got sick right as we were leaving.”

“Is that usual?”

Stiles shakes his head. “Only when people talk about him without the wings.” He frowns, thinking about what he just said. “Oh fuck.”

“What?”

Stiles doesn’t answer and pulls out his phone to call his dad.

“Hey, Stiles, did you want to come over for s’mores?”

“No, John, I don’t. Listen, can you tell your new kids to stop talking about my new—” Stiles freezes. What is he supposed to call Derek? “—my action figure,” he finishes lamely.

“Your action figure? Oh! You mean your new doll.”

“Action figure,” Stiles insists weakly. “Yeah. Please don’t talk about it. Please. It’s embarrassing enough to want to carry my limited edition—”

“Yeah, okay. Enough, Stiles. We won’t talk about your embarrassing second childhood,” John jokes. Seriously, he says, “Stiles, make sure you don’t overextend yourself with this new hobby, okay, son?”

“I won’t. Thanks, Dad.”

He tucks away his phone and turns back to Scott. Derek is sitting up, rubbing at his face.

“Oh hey, you’re feeling better?”

Derek taps his throat. “Yeah. Did you figure out how to break the enchantments yet?”

“No. Kinda got interrupted when you started dying.”

Derek grumbles for a few moments before rolling his shoulders. “Well, now that I’m not ‘dying,’” he uses aggressive air quotes, “can you figure out how to break the enchantments so that I can get the fuck away from you?”

“Ouch,” Stiles says, “that would actually hurt if I didn’t dislike you so much.”

He doesn’t dislike Derek though. Not at all. He’s aware that he’s put the tiny man through so much, and he’s been relatively decent about the whole thing.

Stiles wonders what it would have been like if he and Derek had gotten to grow up together, if their mothers hadn’t drifted apart once the Hales forgot their own son, if his mother’s obsession hadn’t been real. He wonders if they would have liked each other.

As it is, Stiles knows as soon as Derek is big again or manages to steal his wings, Stiles will never see him again.

He’s sad about it in a detached way, as if it’s happening to someone else or he’s watching a movie. He knows it will sink in before the end, and he isn’t looking forward to it.

“Okay, well, see you later, Scott. Got lots to do.” He takes both Derek and the wings from Scott and heads back to his room.

Scott looks confused for a moment before turning back to his TV show.

~ * ~

Five hours later, Stiles throws the pen down. He’s copied down all of his mother’s coded text and has translated? Transcribed? Decoded it. He’s also scrounged up some more clothes and food for Derek.

Derek hasn’t spoken at all aside from the required word to unlock the pages.

“Okay, so it says that we need to find the Grandmaster that holds the enchantments,” Stiles says sometime around 2:00 a.m. Derek startles and rolls off his bed.

He stands up and deliberately dusts himself off. “So, that would be Kate,” he says finally, making a big show of tapping his throat. “When her father died, his enchantments passed to her.”

“So we have to kill her?” Stiles doesn’t relish the idea of trying to kill a faerie even if he’s approximately a thousand times her size.

“Well, if she abdicates then all her enchantments automatically pass to her successor. But Kate is not one to abdicate, so yes, we’ll probably have to kill her. Or get her successor to kill her for us.”

“And who is the successor?”

“Allison,” Derek says, like it should be obvious.

“Allison?” Stiles repeats. “The faerie that goes off the preserve when none of the others do?”

“Yeah, that Allison.”

“So we just have to find her and convince her to kill Kate, right?”

“Yep.”

“And how do we do that? I don’t know how to find Allison. Do you?”

“Just take a dog out to the preserve and wait for her to find you,” Derek says. “She has a fondness for all animals, but her favorite is dogs because there’s this guy she’s trying to woo.”

“You realize you’re all the size of a thumb, right? How is Allison supposed to drag a dog that is a hundred times her size to this guy she likes?”

“Most faeries can change size,” Derek says, another ‘duh’ going unspoken. “Obviously I can’t because I’m not a faerie. Allison is exceptionally good at changing size. She can even disguise her wings.”

“So, we take a dog out to the preserve and wait for Allison to fall for the bait. How do we know she’ll take it to the guy and do we know the guy?”

The look of absolute rage Derek gives him seems uncalled for. “Allison,” he says slowly. “Argent or Silver if she’s modeling.”

Stiles’ mind goes embarrassingly blank. “Allison? Model Allison? _Scott’s_ Allison?”

“The one and the same.” Derek smiles smugly. “So, now that you’re all caught up, can we borrow a dog to get Allison to the vet office so we can ask her if she can kill her aunt?”

“Wait, Kate’s her aunt? And she—we—we’re just going to ask her to kill her _aunt_?”

“You ask a lot of questions,” Derek says. He follows it up with a wide yawn. “It’s late. We need to sleep so that any plans we come up with aren’t as stupid as your questions.”

“My questions aren’t stupid,” Stiles snaps. “Just because you know something and I don’t, it doesn’t make me stupid for not knowing.”

Derek blinks slowly before nodding. “You’re right. I’m sorry.”

Stiles sighs. “Look, you’re right too: it’s late, we’re both tired. We’ll pick it up again tomorrow, okay?”

“Okay.” Derek climbs onto the bed and pulls the blanket up to his chin. “Good night, Stiles,” he says. “Thank you.”

Stiles doesn’t answer as he stacks the journals so that he can climb under his own blanket and turn off the light.

He doesn’t want Derek’s thanks. He just wants to get this chapter of his life over with. One door closes and another opens. The sooner he can return Derek to his family, the sooner he can forget his own shortcomings.

If he’s being honest with himself, he’d really just like to curl up in his bed and sleep for a year. Just let everything else pass him by.

Life doesn’t work that way though, so instead, Stiles closes his eyes, gentles his breathing, and tries to sleep.

It’s almost daylight before he manages to drop off.

~ * ~

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've kind of lost my passion for this story. I don't know if it's because I got all the words down even if I'm not fully happy with them, but I do know I'm going to try to post two chapters a day to finish it up before I lose Internet access (and access to the story) again.
> 
> Thanks to everyone who reads it.


	12. Ten

Stiles wakes up when his phone rings shrilly. He doesn’t remember when he set it to a tone instead of vibrate, and he isn’t sure he’s glad about it when his heart wants to pound out of his chest from being startled.

It’s far too early…or rather, it’s late, but Stiles didn’t get nearly enough sleep.

He fumbles the phone up to his ear and grouses out a short greeting.

“Stiles,” his dad says, exasperated. “Can you come over and look after the kids? I just got a call from Talia Hale and she wants to meet right now.”

Stiles grunts unintelligibly and noncommittally, but he still rolls off his bed and stands up. “Okay if I bring my…?”

“Yeah, sure. And I’ll pay you. Thanks, Stiles.”

Stiles perks up a little. If his dad pays him, he should be able to put gas in his Jeep for when he has interviews. Cool.

He grabs the jar with holes in the lid and sets Derek inside. He pauses before dumping the wings in too and twisting the lid on tightly.

He grabs the locking journal, his notebook with his mom’s decoded code, and a cereal bar and heads out to his Jeep.

His dad tosses him a twenty-dollar bill on his way past. “I’ll be back in about an hour or so. Order a pizza or something for lunch.”

Stiles walks into the living room to find the teens sprawled all over the furniture.

“Do you have the little man?” Erica asks immediately.

Stiles pulls out the jar. “I need your help,” he says. “Who wants to break the curse?”

“You’re ready to do that now?” Boyd asks.

Stiles gets the feeling that he’s the levelheaded one. Well, the plan he and Derek came up with last night is still the only plan, so yeah, they’re ready.

“We need to find a dog to take out into the preserve to entice one of the faeries to go to the vet’s office.”

“What?” Boyd asks with flat inflection.

“You want to do what?” Isaac demands. “How is that supposed to help?”

“Well, it’s a little complicated. Here, I’ll let Derek explain.” He opens the jar, tipping Derek out into his palm. Derek has the wings back on his back even though they’re too broken to use. So much for his claim that he could fix them, Stiles thinks, not without some bitterness.

Derek taps his throat. “There is a hierarchy to the faeries. Grandmasters are at the top.”

Stiles already knows all this, so he leaves Derek to it, settled on the coffee table, three faces crowded around him even though he can project loud enough to be heard just fine. Then, Stiles wanders into the kitchen and calls Scott.

“Hey, dude,” Scott says. “Why are you calling me? I’ve got a lot of work today.”

His voice sounds suspiciously like his Allison-voice.

“Hey, Scott. Is Allison there? Like, right now?”

“You know I can’t confirm that,” Scott hisses. The background noise drops suddenly, and Scott whispers into the phone, “Yes, Allison is here. I’m kinda freaking out. What am I supposed to say to her?”

“Uh, vet stuff?” Stiles suggests. “I gotta go. I’m looking after the kids today.”

“Okay, see you after.”

Stiles hangs up and runs back to the living room.

“Derek, Allison is already at the vet office. We’ve gotta go now. Come on, kids.”

He doesn’t bother checking to see if the kids follow him. He just grabs Derek and tucks him into his front pocket. When he gets out to his Jeep and climbs into the driver’s seat, he notices Erica and Boyd crawling into the backseat while Isaac takes the front passenger seat.

“Thought you didn’t like my plan?” Stiles smirks.

“That’s when you were talking about kidnapping a dog and using it to lure someone somewhere.”

“Yeah, okay. So this removes the sketchy aspect.”

“Not really,” Isaac remarks. “It just removes the dog aspect.”

Stiles can’t really argue with that logic, so he remains quiet and takes the turn to the outskirts of town.

“Borrow your wings so that Scott can help us?” Stiles asks Derek, aware that this is the first time he’s not just taking what he wants or needs. Derek hesitates briefly before slipping off the wings and letting Stiles have them.

He parks next to a gorgeous silver Lexus, trying not to park too close in case the owner, presumably Allison, decides to yell at him.

“Fancy car,” Boyd remarks quietly as they pass it, heading for the front door.

“Model’s car,” Stiles says. He checks his pocket to make sure Derek is comfortable before he steps into the vet office. He wants to pause, take in the scene, make sure he’s not about to be ambushed by a size-changing faerie, but he’s got three teens at his back and business waiting inside. One foot in front of the other and he heads to the counter.

“Hey,” he calls, hoping that Scott can hear him, wherever he is. Up front is completely empty, but Scott’s bike, the Lexus, and Deaton’s old Nova are parked outside. They’ve all got to be here somewhere.

“Hello?” he calls again, and then he hears Scott fumbling to the counter, talking over his shoulder.

“Oh, hey, Stiles, new Stilinskis,” he says when he catches sight of them. “What are you all doing here?”

“Uh, well, catch.”

Scott instinctively catches the wings when Stiles tosses them at him. “What’s this about?” he asks, suspicious.

“Scott, what’s going on?”

The woman that steps out of the back definitely lives up to her model status. Her long, dark hair is pulled back in a cascading ponytail, flawless makeup accentuating her high cheekbones. She’s really pretty in a kind of out-of-this-world way.

“Hey, you must be Allison,” Stiles says, sticking his hand out. He doesn’t miss the way her eyes cut to his pocket before she grips his hand and pumps it twice.

“Pleasure.” She pauses, biting her perfect, red lip.

“Stiles,” Stiles supplies. “Scott’s roommate.”

“Stiles. Of course. Nice to meet you.”

Her eyes drift back to his pocket again. Stiles cups his hand around Derek before gently helping him out onto his palm.

“There you are,” Allison says softly. Derek waves at her.

“So, why are you really here, Stiles,” Scott asks. “And why did you bring Derek?”

“We’re going to break the curses on Derek.” Stiles looks at Allison. “And we need your help, Allison.”

“What do you want me to do?” Allison doesn’t look angry or interested. In fact, she looks a little worried. “I’m not a Grandmaster yet. I can’t reverse any spells.”

“You can challenge the current Grandmaster,” Stiles says. He thrusts Derek at her. “You know Derek deserves better. His family deserves to have their son back.”

“And who told you that a new Grandmaster could break the curses?”

Derek taps his throat. “Claudia.”

Allison rears back. “Claudia?” she asks, shaken. “How did she do that?”

“She left journals,” Derek explains. “She remembered me when no one else did. She figured out how to break the curses so I can finally go home.”

Allison wipes away a tear, face resolving into a fierce mask. “Just tell me what you need me to do and I will do it.”

“Okay,” Stiles says. “That was easy.”

Allison laughs. “Sometimes, all you need is a sliver of hope. Anyway. Do you have Claudia’s instructions or what?”

“Yeah, I have them. Scott, can you come too or do you have to stay here?”

“I’m in the middle of a shift, Stiles,” Scott says. “How exactly am I supposed to go with you?”

“Actually, he’s free,” Dr. Deaton says behind Scott. “It’s a slow day. I’ll call if I need any help. Go on. Go help your friends.”

“If you’re sure.” Scott doesn’t wait for Deaton to change his mind, already heading for Stiles’ Jeep. Too late he realizes that there isn’t much room for him, what with three teens glaring sullenly at him and he turns a questioning eye to Allison.

“Scott and I will meet you at the end of the road into the preserve.” She looks thoughtful. “Call the Hales and tell them to gather all the iron and salt they can. We’ll need it for the rituals.”

Scott hands Derek’s wings back to Stiles, and he tucks them and Derek back into his pocket. Scott and Allison drive off, while Stiles climbs behind the wheel of his Jeep.

He recalls his dad calling about something this morning. All he’d heard was having to go look after the kids. But why?

Scan brain. Scan brain. Scan brain. All Stiles could remember was it had something to do with Talia.

Stiles calls his dad.

“Hey, kiddo, now’s not really a good time.” Dad sounds like he’s been crying.

Concerned, Stiles asks, “Are you still with Talia Hale?”

“Yes. We’re busy.”

“You’re about to be a lot busier. We need you and Talia to join us in the preserve. Have Talia call her family and have them bring as much iron and salt as they can find. We’re going to need it.”

“Why?”

Stiles sighs. “Because, Dad, we’re going to get Derek Hale back from the faeries.”

He ignores the feel of Derek’s puke soaking into his pocket. He needs his dad to believe, just once. Just one time in his life and they can save someone. He wills his dad to listen, to for once remember the dedication his wife gave to this task, and come help.

John sighs back at him. “Fine. Talia and I will meet you at the entrance to the preserve.”

“And you’ll bring the rest of the Hales too,” Stiles presses.

John sighs again. “Fine. Yes. We’ll bring the rest of the Hales. And,” he adds before Stiles can remind him, “we’ll tell them to round up all the iron and salt they can. Happy?”

“Soon,” Stiles says and disconnects the call.

The three teens are staring at him. It’s a little disconcerting.

“What?”

“Do you always talk to your dad like that?” Erica asks.

Stiles shrugs. “Lately, yeah.”

“Can I?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s rude, that’s why not.”

Stiles thinks on his logic. Why _is_ he being rude to his dad? Is it because he resents him for being the parent to survive? Is it because he’s angry at both of them for dismissing his mom’s lifework when she got sick?

Stiles doesn’t want to get into it right now, but he makes himself a promise: if they can return Derek to the Hales today, then he will be nicer to his father.

“We should be driving now,” Boyd says from the back.

“Right, yeah. Seatbelts on.” Stiles waits until all three teens click their belts and then he turns the key in the ignition. It won’t take long to get to the preserve. Deaton’s business is literally the last building in town before they hit the preserve. Technically, the Hales live outside of the town they helped found.

Stiles hopes Allison will know what to do when they get there because Stiles doesn’t want to end up cursing them all, or worse, getting them killed.

He sets his mouth, squares his shoulders, and starts driving.

~ * ~


	13. Eleven

By the time Stiles makes it to the preserve, everyone else is already assembled, even the promised Hale children.

Erica looks at the youngest Hales, twins Cora and Isadora, with something akin to longing, even though they’re both twenty-one and she’s thirteen. Boyd and Isaac seem less inclined to show how they’re feeling, but Stiles thinks it’s similar to Erica’s look of want. Maybe it’s the family aspect they want? Whatever it is, he’ll have time to talk to them afterward. If they all survive.

“Any iron?” he asks his dad. He dad points at a frankly terrifying stack of rusted pieces of metal.

“The Hales run a scrap yard,” he explains.

“Why did your family target the Hales?” Stiles asks Allison. She shrugs.

“Because my grandfather, the original Grandmaster, was an asshole. He didn’t like that the Hales were in the iron business. To him, that meant they were declaring war. But the Hales never attacked us. They never set up barriers or tried to trick us, and many of us became unafraid of the giants. So he used a new tactic. He lured a child into the woods, into the center of one of our circles and he stole him.”

“Derek,” Stiles whispers, opening his pocket so that Derek, a little worse for the wear, can climb out onto his hand.

“Yes,” Allison says. “He told us that the giants would be mad, that they wanted this child back. No matter how we begged him, he refused to return Derek. He said he had taken precautions to protect us from the giants and it required us to keep the child.”

“My mom wrote that your aunt wanted to keep him and that’s why your grandfather didn’t return him.”

“Perhaps. That might be what Claudia believed. My grandfather was manipulative, there is no denying that.” Allison holds out her hands, and Stiles hands her his mother’s journal even though he doesn’t want to let it go. She takes the wings that Derek freely offers her and waves them over the book. The book opens to the section near the end, entirely in code. Allison taps the page and the glyphs shimmer with a purple glow and then transform into actual letters.

All that work and turns out they didn’t need Stiles’ decoded pages. Except Allison turns to him, hand extended again.

“The texts,” she says.

“What?”

“The texts. Your mother’s words mean nothing to those that can’t read them. Her words, even translated, are magicked. I cannot read her words. But you can. Please, where are the texts?”

Stiles digs in his Jeep until he finds the pages he’d worked on last night. Two colors of text covering seven numbered pages. One color to represent his approximation of his mother’s code and the other for his decoding of it below. He’d been too tired to read much of it last night, just that the words made some sort of sense. And then he’d argued with Derek and gone to sleep.

He hands the stack of papers to Allison, taking back Derek’s wings. “This is it.”

“Wonderful. Thank you. Now, I need everyone to gather as much iron and salt as they can carry and follow me to the entrance.”

“The entrance to what?” Talia demands.

Allison looks at her with a sorrowful expression. “The entrance to my world.” Then, the tattoos on her back unfurl into thin, silvery wings.

She lifts up, and as she does she shrinks, and so do the pages in her hands. Soon she is no bigger than a butterfly. No bigger than Derek was when Stiles first found him.

It’s not hard to follow her. She flies slowly, a silver flash among all the green. One of the Hale twins sticks a metal pole in Stiles’ hand.

“Did you really find my brother?” she asks.

Stiles curls his fingers around Derek. “Yes,” he says, opening his other hand for her to take Derek’s wings. When he shows her Derek, she sobs once, hand pressed against her mouth. Her sister crowds near her, reaches out a finger to touch the wings too.

“Derek,” she breathes. “We were too little to remember you at all.” She touches the wings. “These have memories of you.”

“I should hope so, Isadora, Cora,” Derek returns. “They’re my wings. I made them.” Bashfully, he adds, “I magicked them so that people could remember me when they were touched.” He points at where Allison last was. “We should really catch up to Allison now. The more time we give Kate to organize, the harder it will be to take her down.”

“That’s why we brought enough salt containers for everyone and something iron for each person,” Cora says. Stiles thinks. One twin has long hair, the other has a bob cut. Cora, if Stiles is right, has a loose ponytail while Isadora has a Dora-the-Explorer haircut.

The one with the bob pulls away first. “Derek’s right. If we don’t take them by surprise, who knows if our preparations are even going to work.”

Cora hands the wings back to Stiles. “We’re not going to fail.” She squares her shoulders. “We can’t fail.”

The group is large, Talia and her husband, their six children, Scott, John, the three teens, and Stiles. All of them with a canister of iodized salt and something metal in hand.

If Stiles remembers the little of the decoded text that he read correctly, when they get to the entrance to the faeries’ home, they’ll have to make their own circle of unbroken salt and iron. With, Stiles does a quick headcount again, fourteen people, they should definitely be able to encircle the faerie entrance. He just worries about the other faeries. Yes, they were complacent in the kidnapping and imprisonment of Derek, but if what Allison had said was true, and their Grandmaster had lied to them for so long, then they were victims in the scheme as well.

Except for Kate. When Grandmaster passed to her, so did her father’s magick. Instead of realizing that she could release Derek, she’d kept him, bound him even more.

Stiles half expects all the faeries to be out and about, sensing the coming threat.

Instead, when they reach the little clearing with the faerie circle, only Allison, big again, is standing there, Stiles’ pages in her hands.

“Kate sealed the entrance from outsiders.” The pain in her face tells them that Kate has made her an outsider.

“Is Kate in there too?” Stiles asks. He’s thinking now, that if Kate is outside, they can surround her with the iron and the salt. Whatever magick she’s done will pass to Allison and she can undo the sealing against outsiders, or just reverse who is considered an outsider.

“I’m right here, sweetie,” a saccharine voice calls out. As soon as Stiles sees her, he recognizes her. It’s the faerie with the flat mouth. The teacher who didn’t get her way and punished her students.

“Kate Argent,” John says. And it’s a surprise that his dad knows her too.

“Sheriff,” Kate purrs, sliding up to him. She notices the iron and salt and hisses. “Allison, get away from these intruders.”

“I brought them with me,” Allison says. The tears are gone. Her back is straight. She’s ready to take on her aunt. “Create a circle around her, join iron and then pour salt.”

Kate shrinks, flying up, wings beating.

“No!” one of the Hale boys shouts and slams down on her with a metal post. Stunned, Kate falls to the ground, big again.

The Hales and Stilinskis close ranks, touching their iron pieces, mostly poles, some sheets, and in the case of the twins bracelets. Kate screeches. When she stands up, she doesn’t resemble human at all.

It’s like she was splashed with acid that’s already burning through her in places. Her nose is gone, melted away. There’s blue energy curling off her skin, tinting her green. The power coming off her is frightening.

Allison stands behind Talia, Stiles’ pages in her hands. “Start pouring the salt,” she commands.

If Kate feels powerful, Allison sounds in control. She doesn’t sound worried at all, and strangely it makes Stiles settle.

Kate is contained. The iron is working. Most of the pieces are long enough that they can touch while still having a free hand. Someone had foresight and the salt is open. Stiles swoops an arc onto the ground. Around the circle, everyone follows suit until there is a thick line of salt all the way around Kate.

“If you think salt and iron is enough,” Kate hisses, “then you’ve never met a Grandmaster like me before, have you?”

She wraps a tendril of energy around her hand, balls it up, and throws it at Talia. Her form is whole again, nose and all.

“Your reign as Grandmaster is over.” Allison grabs the energy and throws it back at Kate.

It does nothing, as far as Stiles can tell.

Kate then launches several bursts of energy at all of them.

A searing pain slams into Stiles’ shoulder where one of her blasts skims him. His first thought is for Derek. He hadn’t put him back in his pocket. He doesn’t know where Derek went. The wings too. Hopefully, he took his wings and fixed them and is now hiding in the foliage. If one of Kate’s energy blasts hits him, he’ll be incinerated.

“Kate, you’ve ruled long enough,” Allison announces. Then she says something in another language. Some of the salt wavers, as if a hand brushed through it, and then rises to wrap around Kate’s legs. She howls, kicking. Her foot catches Stiles’ dad in the chest, and he falls backward out of the circle, arms wind milling, pipe dropped, salt tipped and spilling out.

Kate uses the hole he makes and leaps out of the circle. Except, it seems that she forgot they all poured salt on the ground, and apparently it acts like faerie repellant because it flings her back into the center of the circle.

“What did you do?” she growls at the people. “It’s just salt! It’s not even the right kind!”

“‘It doesn’t matter what kind is used,’” Allison reads, “‘as long as the people using it believe it works.’ Hear that, Kate? It’s belief. And these people believe.”

Which is a goddamned miracle, as far as Stiles is concerned. The Hales, his dad, and Scott can’t remember Derek, and he doesn’t know why the teens and he do.

“If I can find one of them that doesn’t,” Kate stares at each of them in turn, “then I can get out. You’re not powerful enough to stop me, niece.”

Allison speaks more words in that language and more of the salt scrabbles at Kate’s ankles. She kicks at it and at one of the Hale boys. Like John, he topples out of the circle. John’s back in already.

“David!” Talia calls.

“I’m all right, Mom,” he responds, picking himself up.

One by one, Kate kicks each of them out of the circle, and one by one, they pick themselves up and rejoin. She’s frustrated and panicking. Every time she kicks someone else, they flail salt into her face. Her flesh melts and restructures itself. The mass of writhing worms beneath her skin makes Stiles think that that’s what faeries must be. But he never saw that in his mom’s research.

Maybe she hadn’t had the chance to face down a Grandmaster?

Or he hasn’t found it yet. There are still dozens of notebooks he hasn’t gotten to yet.

“Hey, Kate,” he calls, wincing when she turns her furious glare to him. “How’d your father die? Grandmaster powers have to be passed down, right? Did you kill your father or did someone else do your dirty work for you?”

Kate leans in close to him. Stiles can’t breathe. She smells like sulfur and burning flesh. She presses a finger to the wound on his shoulder, and he realizes that he’s leaning over the line of salt, into her reach. He can’t break free, can’t even struggle against the pain. “Do you know why your mother died?” she counters. “She meddled where mortals have no business being. She remembered when she shouldn’t have. That needed correcting.”

“My mom’s disease?”

Kate nods. “Her frontotemporal dementia. The onset, the progression. Doctors didn’t know what to do.” Her smile slides in like a knife, twists its blade.

“You killed my mom because—”

“She killed my father,” Kate finishes. “I inherited my father’s magick because a mortal couldn’t keep herself from meddling.”

“So you gave her frontotemporal dementia?”

“No,” Kate smiles, the blade twists harder, “I just made it worse. She could have lived years before I got a hold of her.”

“All because she remembered Derek Hale?”

Kate draws back, her face startling blank. “No. I killed her because she killed my father.”

Stiles wants to ask her how his mom managed to do that. Did she use iron and salt like they have now? Or did she manage a low-level magick that was able to somehow defeat a Grandmaster of faerie magick?

Instead, he throws salt in her face, following it up with a smack from his pole. Kate screams in pain and rage, and Stiles braces for the retaliatory hit.

It never comes. Instead, everyone else takes a step forward, shakes more salt into a circle and clangs their iron together. Allison shouts a phrase that almost sounds like Latin to Stiles’ untrained ear.

“This is nonsense,” Kate says. “Allison, stop this at once. The magick you are trying to wield is mortal, stolen from your grandfather and twisted into some abomination that can’t do whatever it is you’re hoping to do.”

“Remember, belief is key,” Allison calls instead of responding to her aunt. “If you believe, we can beat her.”

Kate swivels around, facing down Stiles’ dad. “John,” she pleads, so different from how she spoke to Stiles, “John, remember when Claudia was in pain and I helped you. I helped you take away her pain.”

“You just admitted that you caused her pain,” John says through clenched teeth. “Did that medicine even help her or did it just make her die faster?”

“It numbed her pain,” Kate admits, quietly. “At that point, she was already dead. There was no value in her suffering at that point. She was of no use to me anymore.”

“Why?” John whispers.

“Because, once she died, there would be no one left who remembered Derek Hale. I could finally convert him into a full faerie. But then, Claudia died and I still couldn’t transform him.”

“So someone else remembered him.” John shrugs.

“Exactly. But who?” Kate turns to face Stiles. “If you hadn’t found your mother’s journals, do you think you would have learned that you could remember Derek Hale when others couldn’t?”

“Probably not,” Stiles admits. “I mean, I didn’t remember him for how long after he was taken. Why do I remember him now?”

“I can answer that later,” Allison says. “For now, I need everyone to say Stiles’ name.”

“No one can say my name,” Stiles mutters over the puzzled and weak ‘Stileses’ coming from the others.

A sudden shout of “Mieczysław!” gives him pause.

“Derek?”

His wings aren’t fixed and he’s still small, but Derek has managed to climb a tree. He cups his hands around his mouth even though he doesn’t need to. “Mieczysław!”

The Hales and the teens take up the cry. They butcher the syllables at first and Kate just laughs at them. Then, they hit their stride. Stiles stands still and listens to twelve people screaming his name at an oversized faerie.

Thirteen people, because Derek’s still saying his name. Fourteen because John has joined in.

Fuck it.

Fifteen people.

If Stiles’ name is the magick word, then fuck everything else. He shouts at the top of his lungs, throwing the rest of his salt at Kate as he does so. It glows purple as it wraps around her.

“No,” she screams, clawing at it.

Scott tosses his salt at her too, chanting Stiles’ real name like a mantra. It strikes Stiles that this is the first time that his roommate, his childhood friend, his best friend, has ever said his name properly. Every so often Scott tries. He failed as a kid because Stiles couldn’t say it right either and couldn’t correct him, and then it was like a game not to correct Scott’s pronunciation.

Well, he’s certainly saying it right now. In fact, everyone has great pronunciation now.

They all throw the dregs of their salt canisters at Kate, and the power of Stiles’ name imbues the grains with enough magick to stick to her and melt her faster than she can repair herself.

The final blow comes when Allison instructs them to lay their iron at Kate’s feet and step back.

“Katherine Argent, with this mettle, I hereby bind you to nevermore darken either the mortal or immortal realms. Have you any last words before you are turned?”

Kate screams unintelligibly.

Allison nods. “Your words are accepted as a passing of the power. No longer are you the Grandmaster. Goodbye, aunt.”

With a sudden _whoosh_ , Kate’s screams cut off as she turns into a statue of stone.

At almost the same time, Stiles’ senses go off, and he tilts dangerously to one side. Before he can correct his list, he drops to the ground, all energy gone. His ears ring and he can taste iron in his mouth.

“Stiles?” he hears faintly, and then…he passes out.

~ * ~

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have the final two chapters (Twelve and Epilogue) edited and ready to post. I can either do it today or tomorrow. Let me know what you'd rather see. Thanks! Also, do you think I've missed a tag or two? Please let me know.


	14. Twelve

“Hey, you’re okay,” Stiles hears and then awareness slams into him.

His limbs tingle in a way he hasn’t had to deal with for almost three years.

“I fainted?” he asks, hoping that it’s his dad leaning over him.

“Yeah.” He’s not disappointed.

“And Kate’s still stone?”

“Yep.”

“Can I sit up now?”

“Sure, but take it easy. Aurora is a nurse so she’s going to assess you as we go, okay?”

Hands lift him to a sitting position far more slowly than he’d like, but eventually, he’s upright, staring at the stone faerie.

“I’m sorry I fainted.”

“Hey, no, that’s okay.” Dad pats at him while Aurora takes his pulse. “I mean, there was a lot of—whatever—in the air. I’m surprised more of us didn’t go down.”

“Well, it was Stiles’ name that we were yelling,” Allison says. She brushes a hand down Stiles’ arm, and he shudders under her touch. He does feel better though afterward and stands up finally.

“Where’s Derek?” Stiles doesn’t think he was out long, but still someone should have gotten him out of the tree he’d managed to climb.

“He’s right here.” Allison hands Derek to Stiles. The tiny man looks worse for the wear. His hair is soaked through with sweat, his clothes puke-stained. He moves sluggishly, picking up his head to stare almost balefully at Stiles.

“Hey, how are you feeling?”

Derek shakes his head, letting it drop back to Stiles’ palm.

“Can you make him big again?” Stiles asks Allison. “You got all the magick from your aunt, right? So you can reverse whatever your grandfather did.”

“I can try.”

“You also said you’d explain why I no longer don’t remember Derek.”

“Let’s try getting him big again first.” Allison takes Derek back, lying him on a large, smooth stone that definitely wasn’t there before they’d started the binding ritual.

Using a finger that is glowing orange, Allison traces down Derek’s spine. She pulls back and the light stays with Derek, expanding to engulf his whole body. Then, it spreads out, growing too bright to stare at directly.

When it finally fades, Derek sits up. He’s definitely big again. For the first time in over twenty years.

Stiles moves closer, approaching as if Derek is a wild animal, wary and ready to bite.

With his features being big enough to actually discern, he’s kinda handsome. In a sort of grumpy way. He’s glaring for one thing, eyebrows bushy and low over his eyes. And his eyes. Stiles had thought they were just blue, but turns out they’re all kinds of greens, blues, and browns.

“You’re staring at me,” Derek says, and while he sounds a little put out, Stiles thinks it’s because he just was grown a thousand times the size he’s been for the last twenty-odd years. Also, he’s probably thrown up more in the past three days than he has in years.

“You okay?” Stiles asks instead of everything else that’s rattling around in his brain, like “Did it hurt when you changed?” and “What did it feel like when we said your name but couldn’t remember you after?”

Derek looks down at the clothes he’s wearing—a set from Scott made him. Thankfully they grew with him or he’d be sitting naked in the forest, and that’s an image that Stiles can’t spend too long thinking about. He already has the images of small Derek nearly naked and soaking wet locked in his brain.

Derek seems to be thinking the same thing, because his ears turn red and he ducks his head. “Thanks for helping me,” he mumbles.

“Hey, no worries. I’m just glad that everyone else went along with this scheme without much convincing.”

“The magick must have been cracking,” Allison says. “It should not have been that easy to undo.”

“Does the fact that it was second-hand magick have anything to do with it?” one of the Hales, Laura, Stiles thinks, asks. “I mean, if it was your grandfather that created the magick, and then your aunt took it over, and now it’s yours. Does that mean that it would have weakened over time?”

Allison pauses, thinking. “Perhaps. A lot of our magick is based on belief. If we all believed that Kate’s magick could be defeated, then that may have been enough to break it altogether.”

“Glad that could be fixed then,” Stiles jokes weakly. He eyes Derek, noticing that his family is doing the same. They should probably get out of here and let the Hales have a proper reunion.

Derek turns to Stiles, rolling his shoulders in an awkward shrug, the wings still on his back shudder with the motion. “Thanks again,” he says, and then, surprisingly, he throws his arms around Stiles and squeezes briefly before retreating to his parents’ sides.

His mom and dad lay hands on his shoulders, and Derek seems to droop, exhaustion or relief wilting him from the inside out.

“Before you leave,” Allison says, “I must tell you about something that was predicated by one of our greatest seers.”

And if that doesn’t sound like the most bullshittiest sentence ever spoken, then Stiles will hunt down a hat and consume it like a taco. Maybe Scott will loan him some hot sauce to wash it down.

Derek must have almost the same thought because his face scrunches into suspicion. “No,” he says, but Allison ignores his protest and keeps talking.

And it gets worse.

“Long ago, one of our seers, the one with the greatest connection to our source of magick predicted that the faerie realm and the mortal realm would be melded together with a union between one of the faeries and one of the mortals.”

Stiles waits her out. As does everyone else. It’s awkward as fuck.

“You, Stiles, and Derek have that connection. You can fulfill the prediction.”

Emphatically, and agreeably, Derek says, “Fuck you.”

He turns to Stiles. “That prophecy has been hanging over the Argent colony for nearly seventy years. If anyone can make it happen, it’s Allison and Scott.” He turns back to Allison. “You’re of the faerie realm and Scott is mortal. Or did you forget that I’m actually from the mortal realm?”

“You’ve spent long enough entrenched in our realm that you count as a faerie. If you want, your wings can be made permanent, more like ours.” Allison flaps her wings as if they needed the reminder that she isn’t quite human when the rest of them are.

Derek looks conflicted for a second before he shakes his head. “My wings still work.” Not true. They’re definitely broken. “Besides, I just want to go home. Can’t you fulfill your own prophecy?”

Scott steps forward. “He’s right. You are of the fairy realm. I’m mortal. We’ve been making a connection. We can certainly try, can’t we?”

Allison shakes her head. “It was foretold that it was a faerie not born of the realm that would need to join union with a mortal.”

“It never said that,” Derek says. “You just want to—” he breaks off, too frustrated to speak, it appears.

“Derek,” Allison says gently. She taps his chest, right where his heart should be and then walks over to Stiles to repeat the motion against his chest.

It tingles, feels weird. Stiles swipes at it, surprised when his hand encounters a string. He glances down. There’s a red thread leading from his heart to Derek’s.

“What’s this?”

“Your connection.”

Stiles strums the string and shudders at the way it resonates in his chest. Derek rubs at his chest at the same time.

“Huh.”

“Please, I just want to go home with my family,” Derek whispers. “Please don’t make me stay here any longer.” He shoots an apologetic look at Stiles. “It’s not that I don’t feel the connection, but I don’t believe it’s strong enough to fulfill the prophecy, which is bullshit anyway.”

“I agree,” Stiles says. He points at Allison. “You need to undo this magick now. Derek’s been kept from his family long enough. I won’t participate in his separation any longer.”

Allison shrugs. “I can’t undo the magick because it’s not my magick to undo. It wasn’t passed on to me with the rest of the Grandmaster’s magick.” She circles her fingers, looping them around but not touching the string. “It’s a miracle. And,” she adds, eyeing Derek warily, “it’s the way back home for Derek.”

“How can that be possible?” John breaks in.

Allison shrugs again. “It just is. That’s the way the magick works.”

“You also said it works on belief,” John reminds her. “So what happens if we all just believe that that string doesn’t exist? That the connection you claim they have isn’t real? What happens then?”

“I don’t know,” Allison admits, “but give it time. Don’t believe it away just yet.”

“That’s a tall order,” John says, “one that we can’t make promises on. You’re asking a lot of two people who’ve just met, have just had a life-changing event together and for one of them, this is another event in a long line of trauma. You can’t wave your hand and have all of that disappear just because someone once said that it should be so. Let them live. They’re supposed to be twenty-five.”

Stiles is so proud of his dad for standing up for him. He’s also proud that his dad is standing for Derek too. Allison may be a good faerie, but Stiles doesn’t think good faeries really exist. If they did, then she’d realize that what Derek needs now is time to reconnect with the family that he’s been kept from for twenty years. Red string be damned.

Stiles plucks it one last time, watches Derek react to the tugging sensation, and then wishes with all his might that it will disappear.

It doesn’t quite disappear, but it does fade. Derek touches it once, shudders, and then faces his parents. He looks ready to get the awkwardness out of the way, but Stiles can’t leave well enough alone. He doesn’t want to go away without a promise, of what, he doesn’t know.

He taps on Derek’s shoulder. “Hey, so, I know I wasn’t the nicest to you during these past few days, but I’d just like to stay in touch. You know, after an adjustment period. If you don’t mind.”

Derek shrugs dismissively. “Yeah, sure,” he says, slowly, like he doesn’t quite believe the words coming from his mouth. “See you around.” Then, deliberately, he turns away from Stiles.

The Hales wander off, almost in a daze, heading back to their house, Derek in their midst. Stiles waits for any of them to turn back, but none do. The Hales and Stilinskis have well and truly split, any chance of a reunion fading faster than the string.

John taps Stiles’ shoulder before wrapping him in a hug. “It’ll be okay,” he says into Stiles’ hair. “You’ll see. Time will heal everything.”

“Has it healed you?” Stiles asks, thinking of how this all started, with his dad and him cleaning out the attic and finding Mom’s things.

“Ah, well, no,” John admits, “but things are much better now. You know that. You remember how it used to be. Don’t you think that things are better now?”

“They are,” Stiles agrees. His dad’s advice is cheesy but sound. After all, they went through rehab together. Time does heal things eventually, and yet pain remains.

“Come on, let’s get home. Stiles, do you want to spend the night with us? Since it’s still so warm out, we were going to camp in the backyard tonight. We’ve got those big tents, remember? There’ll be plenty of room.”

“That actually sounds really good.”

It will be nice to have the company of his dad—and the three teens—but he worries about Scott. Allison basically rejected him and they’d been on their way to something.

Scott is a good friend though. He pats Stiles on the back, says, “See you back at the apartment soon,” and heads out, presumably to walk the two miles back to Deaton’s vet clinic.

Allison frowns after him before she takes flight, calling his name.

Maybe there’s hope there after all.

It doesn’t make Stiles feel any better.

Also, he realizes that she never told him why he could remember Derek after all when he’d obviously forgotten him as a kid. Well, if Stiles sees another faerie anytime, it’ll be too soon.

John keeps his arm around Stiles as they and the teens head back down the trail to where they left their vehicles. It’s a rare comfort that Stiles allows. He doesn’t often get hugs from his dad anymore, mostly because he’s not living at home anymore.

John apparently rode with the Hales; his car isn’t parked at the entrance to the preserve. John climbs into the backseat with Boyd and Isaac, and Stiles does his best not to laugh at the way they sit with their shoulders almost up to their ears. Erica, conversely, lounges in the front seat, even though she barely has the room.

“No feet on the dash,” Stiles says, his standard warning when he has passengers. He’s read so many horror stories of people being folded in half because of car accidents.

Erica nods sagely, which is not something Stiles is expecting. These kids aren’t half as jaded as he’d expected them to be, coming in as foster kids and all. Even Isaac with his blank faces and sarcastic comments isn’t as angry as he maybe comes off at first.

These kids are going to be good for his dad. This might just be the final hurdle his dad has to climb to get back into the real world.

As if reading his mind, John says, “I’m going to be opening a bookstore in downtown Beacon Hills. I’ve got the building picked out and everything.”

“Can I work there?” Boyd asks, quietly, like he’s expecting to be told no.

“Of course. There will be rules because you’re fourteen.”

“Can I work there too?” Erica asks, and Isaac nods.

“No, sorry. You’re both thirteen. You’ll have to wait for your birthdays.” John pauses, and Stiles knows something else is coming. He doesn’t have to wait long before his dad says, “I’d like to hire you, Stiles. Just until something else comes up for you.”

“That sounds nice. Are you going to make me interview?”

“No. I know you. I’m your best reference.”

Stiles has to laugh at that. His dad is right, though; he does know him.

A sudden thought occurs to Stiles. “Hey, if you’re opening a bookstore, do you think I should write down this experience, you know, Mom’s journals, Derek’s abduction and return? Make it into a cautionary tale?”

John doesn’t answer for a few minutes. Then, “I don’t think so. I think if you write it, make it fictionalized, but don’t do that to your mom’s memory. It wouldn’t be fair to remind everyone just how much they mistreated her when she was alive.”

What John means is he and Stiles don’t need to be reminded that they were part of the problem, that they essentially abandoned Claudia when she needed them most. Stiles can agree with that sentiment.

“I’ll probably have to talk to the Hales about it first, though, huh?”

“Probably,” John says. “Why don’t you give it time? Come back to it in a week or a month?”

Or never, Stiles hears. “Okay,” he says, vowing to drop it, punt it off a bridge and watch it fall into the water below. It was a stupid idea anyway. “Sure.”

“Don’t, Stiles,” John says tiredly. “I didn’t mean that you should immediately not do it. Work on it. Go on. You have my blessing. I just ask that you don’t vilify unnecessarily.”

“Okay. Sure.” Even though they’re the same words, they’re different. Stiles knows what his dad means, and he will do his best to both honor his mother’s memory and not judge the people who were affected by Kate and her father’s curses.

“Thank you,” John says.

Stiles feels it in his bones. They may not have as much of a recovery as the Hales, but it’ll be a climb, that’s for sure. Vaguely, Stiles wonders if his dad still hides vodka under the bathroom sink. Guiltily, he discards that thought. He doesn’t need to pick up drinking again.

He doesn’t need to bury his pain under a vice. It won’t help anyway.

But it’s nice that he has a job to look forward to and some new siblings to train in the art of sneaking around his dad. He’s hoping that things keep going up even if he has a mostly invisible string tying him to the grumpiest faerie that isn’t really a faerie and a silly prophecy that claims they should be together.

John’s right that time will make things better.

Stiles turns into his dad’s driveway and shuts off the engine. “Who wants to help me set up the tents now?” he asks into the silence.

Slowly, Boyd raises his hand. “I can help,” he says, “but can we get a hoop too? I really want to practice my shots.”

“And I want to work on the roses,” Isaac pipes up. He points at John’s prize-winning roses. “I don’t want to help with the tents though.”

“That’s fine,” John says, pride sparkling in his eyes. “I’ll help you with the roses, and we’ll get a hoop for you, Boyd. What about you, Erica? Is there anything you want to do this afternoon?”

Erica shakes her head. “I just want to draw. I’ll help set up tents if you want me to, but I’d just really like to go draw something.”

“Settled,” Stiles declares, throwing open his door and letting in a slight breeze. “Erica, go get your sketch pad. Boyd, the tents are in the garage. Isaac, Dad loves his roses almost more than he loves me. Be gentle with them.”

Once the teens have scattered, Stiles leans against his Jeep, shoulder to shoulder with his dad. “I think they’ll work out nicely,” he says.

“Sure. They seem happier already. I mean, they’ve only been here for about a day and a half, but they’re good kids.”

“Hey, Dad.”

“Yes, Stiles?”

“I love you.”

“I love you too, son.”

Stiles leans a little closer, puts his head on his dad’s shoulder. “I wish time could pass right now.”

“We all do, Stiles. But it gets better. I promise. Now, are you going to let Boyd drag those tents out all by himself? No? Then go.”

Stiles smiles to himself. The only thing that could make this better is if his mom were here.

He rolls his shoulders, shakes loose the pain of her memory, and heads into the garage to help Boyd.

~ * ~

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Decided I want to get this up today. I'll be busy all day tomorrow and then won't have Internet again until this coming Tuesday, so I'll get the epilogue up tonight too.
> 
> I hope the end of the journey is worth it and does not disappoint.
> 
> Thanks for following along.


	15. Epilogue

~ Two Years Later ~

The bell above the door has been ringing nonstop since Stiles got here at 9:00. Customers in and out. Lots of sales.

It’s Beacon Hills’ annual days celebration, and tourism is booming.

Erica is sitting on a stool, drawing caricatures for $5.00 a picture. Boyd is in the back, stocking inventory. Isaac is hiding in the café area, mixing concoctions for free samples.

John is in his office reading the first official draft of _This Faerie Tale Lyfe_ by Mischief Gajos.

Stiles is busy, busy, busy, and quite happy too. He’ll be glad when the day is done, but for now, the temptation to hover over his father is negated by his need to keep ringing up sales.

The past two years have been kind of fantastic. John went from being a foster parent to an adoptive parent. Boyd is sixteen and trying out for the varsity basketball team come winter. Isaac, not quite fifteen yet, managed to steal the top ribbon in the rose contest this year. John got second, so he was still happy. Erica, fifteen and proud of her learner’s permit, has an internship with an art studio and they’re letting her have a show in about three weeks.

Things are great.

He read all his mom’s journals, had to to write his manuscript. Turns out he has the gene for frontotemporal dementia. The doctors are keeping an eye on it, but he’s doing okay. As far as he figures, the teens could remember Derek because they weren’t born when Derek was cursed. The Argents hadn’t been retroactive or proactive with their magick. As long as everyone in Beacon Hills, especially the Hales, forgot Derek, they were satisfied.

The only thing that still bothers Stiles these days is the fact that he hasn’t seen or heard from the Hales in two years.

The red string still dangles from his heart, and sometimes he can feel a faint plucking, like Derek’s trying to play guitar. Sometimes it glows brighter, but most of the time, it fades into almost nothingness.

Talia tried once to reconnect again, but when they met, Stiles could see the guilt and anger weighing on her and opted to decline any further invitations.

There’s only one Hale he’s invested in, and that Hale won’t give him the time of day.

Allison and Scott are still dating. Stiles moved into the garage—John renovated it for him so that it doubles as a small studio apartment—and Allison moved into the apartment with Scott.

Overall, things are okay. John was right, as usual, that time would be good to them.

What Stiles hates is that every time he sees Allison, she gives him a look like he’s not trying hard enough or that he isn’t really working toward resolving the lack of connection he and Derek supposedly share.

“I need some coffee,” Stiles declares when they finally have a brief respite. The only customers are a mom and two kids browsing the fairytale section.

One day, Stiles hopes to have his book on the bestseller list. For now, he’ll take his dad’s approval.

He heads into the café area and accepts the frothy, sugary drink Isaac thrusts at him. It’s neither good nor bad but it’s cold and liquid, and he drains about half of it in one go.

Isaac looks at him expectantly.

“Needs more flavor?” Stiles tries. “Or less sugar. But it’s a great start.”

One thing he has learned with his siblings is that they need encouragement. It’s okay when he tells himself that his ideas are stupid or they aren’t working, but when he passes that negativity onto his siblings, he can see how it crushes them.

And okay, maybe he’s being a little nicer toward himself these days. He thinks his manuscript is pretty okay. He doesn’t hate it, and he hopes his dad doesn’t either.

Erica is a fantastic artist, Boyd is a superb basketball player, Isaac is a top-notch gardener. And John is a great dad.

The bell rings again, and Stiles hopes that means the mom and her kids have left. It probably actually means that there is a new customer. Still, Erica should be able to handle it.

Then the string vibrates violently, shaking him to his core. Stiles stares down at it. It’s bright red now.

“Hey, Stiles?” Erica calls uncertainly. The string pings again. Stiles strums it right back, shooting a thought of “Fuck you, Derek,” after it.

Then, he steps out of the café and comes face to face with Derek Hale.

He’s wearing a leather jacket even though it’s like 85 out, and his face is flushed. He idly plays with the string, either unaware or uncaring that it’s making Stiles’ heart jump like he’s being electrocuted.

“Stop it,” Stiles says, pissy.

“Sorry,” Derek apologizes, giving the string one last twang. He lets his hands fall to his sides, and Stiles notices that his fingernails are bitten to the quick. His lips are chewed, raw and red-looking. He looks, if Stiles is being honest, like a mess. And not a hot mess. He looks like he hasn’t had a good night’s sleep in about seven years. He hasn’t shaved today, and his face is covered in stubble.

“I’m sorry that it’s taken this long to get back to you,” Derek starts. “My therapist said that I have to take things at a slow pace, and I was kind of scared that you hated me.”

“Why would I hate you?” Stiles asks. “I thought you hated me?”

Derek shakes his head. “I just blew you off. I was supposed to contact you, but the longer I didn’t, the easier it was to pretend that you were just—” Derek waves his hand in some unquantifiable way “—you were. You were just someone that I crossed paths with. And I know you saved me, but I couldn’t handle being tossed into a relationship right away like that.”

“Me either,” Stiles admits. “I wanted to give you time. I wasn’t sure if you hated me because I wouldn’t give you your wings.”

“A little. I mean, I know that you needed them, and ultimately you helped me, but I was mad because it didn’t seem like you were listening to me.”

“I don’t think we would have been any good for each other then.”

Derek shakes his head. “But,” he says, quietly, leaning in a little, fingers coming up to play with the string, “I’d like to try now. I think I’m ready. Are you?”

Stiles covers his hand to stop him from touching the string. “I don’t know. I mean, on one hand, emphatically yes. But on the other, more important hand, no.”

“No?”

“No, dude. You look little ill. Like maybe you haven’t been taking care of yourself properly. What’s your therapist say?”

Derek blushes. “That I’m not taking care of myself,” he mumbles. “It’s hard sometimes. I still have some magick, but my parents get really mad whenever there’s a reminder of what happened to me. It’s like, if I turn a page without touching it, I get yelled at, so I feel like I’m always hiding a part of myself. And I don’t fit in with my siblings. Like, at all. I mean, most of them are out of the house and living their own lives, but the younger ones? They all look at me like I’m some usurper, come to steal away my parents’ affection.”

“Wow,” Stiles says, “that’s a lot to be dealing with. And you’re sure you want to try dating me?”

Derek shrugs. “Can’t be any worse than I feel right now.”

“Ouch.”

Derek smiles ruefully. “I didn’t mean it like that.” He sighs, grabbing a fistful of hair. “I just. I don’t even know what I want but I know that I want you to be there. When I’d lost all hope of being returned to my family, you were there. You figured out how to help me. Now that I’m lost again, I want you by my side, helping me again. And,” Derek adds, almost whispering, “I want to be that for you too. I want to make things better for you.”

“That’s actually kind of sweet.” Stiles glances around. The shop is still mostly empty. “Hey,” he tells Erica, “I need to step out for a bit. I’ll be back in just a few minutes. Can you hold the fort?”

“I’ll call Boyd if I need help,” she promises, waving him away.

Good enough, Stiles decides. He takes Derek’s elbow and leads him outside to the patio seating area.

“Wanna take off your jacket? It’s way too hot to be wearing something like that.”

“Yeah sure.” Derek slips it off and lays it across his lap. “My therapist says I’m using it like armor. Like, if I have it on, then nothing can get to me.” He looks down at it, tracing a pattern only he can see on the fabric. “I think she’s right.”

“Therapists usually are,” Stiles agrees sagely. “So, why do you want to try connecting with me now?”

Derek rolls his shoulders. His strange shrug. Stiles didn’t realize how much he’d missed talking to and interacting with Derek. He’s glad though that Derek is still human-sized. He isn’t sure he wouldn’t be tempted to put Derek in his pocket again if he were small.

“What’s changed now?”

Derek’s mouth flattens. “I hate myself,” he says, and it’s like it’s dragging all his insides out. “I can’t stand the way I don’t understand the world around me. I hate that my siblings hate me. I hate that I can’t be myself around my parents. At least when I lived in that aquarium thing with you, I knew what to expect. You wanted to study me or maybe keep me like a pet. I was used to that. Now, I don’t know. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do except that I’m not doing it.”

“It was a terrarium,” Stiles finally says after a few minutes of silence have passed. “I mean, the aquarium thing. It was a lizard enclosure.” Derek rolls his eyes, but he smiles too, so the sting isn’t there. “I did want to study you. My mom kept journals of her encounters with you. She documented everything, and I wanted to be close to her, so I decided that I’d do that too. And then I realized that you were a real person with real feelings and that I would be just as much of a monster as the faeries that kidnapped you if I didn’t attempt to return you to your rightful home.”

“You weren’t a monster,” Derek says. “You never intentionally hurt me.”

Stiles reaches up to cup the string. “You wanna try having this thing tie us together or do you want to believe it away so that we can start fresh?”

In answer, Derek sticks out his hand. “Hi, my name is Derek Hale. I’m twenty-seven years old, and I live on the edge of the preserve with my parents and three of my six siblings.”

Stiles takes his hand. “Stiles Stilinski. I live in an apartment that used to be a garage and I have three adopted siblings. Nice to meet you, Derek.”

“Nice to meet you, Stiles.” The smile that Derek gives him is genuine, blinding. Beautiful.

Stiles touches the string one last time, closes his eyes, and wills it to go away.

When he opens his eyes, the string is gone, but Derek is still sitting there, smiling at him.

“You’re cute,” Derek says, ducking his head, his smile getting bigger.

“So’re you,” Stiles counters, feeling his own smile growing.

“Hey, Stiles, wanna go on a date tonight?”

Experimentally, Stiles tries to ping the string, but it’s well and truly gone. Now comes the true test of if they ever should have been burdened with it in the first place.

Stiles knows his answer. He takes Derek’s hand, squeezes it gently, and says, “Yes. I’d love to.”

~ The End ~

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to everyone who read, bookmarked, left kudos, subscribed, and commented on this story. I hope the journey was as interesting and fun for you as it was for me.


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